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Wendy Heller, The extravagant business of opera, Early Music, Volume 36, Issue 2, May 2008, Pages 310–314, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/can023
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Opera has always been an expensive and essentially unprofitable business. Our fantasies of the genre's painless birth, assisted by humanistic midwives and nurtured by idealistic Florentine nobles, fail to take account of how difficult and potentially unrewarding it is to produce any sung drama, let alone a successful one. A good production requires singers of high quality, decent music and libretto, reasonably dazzling spectacle, expert instrumental playing, fine dancing, and sufficient rehearsal time to manage all these disparate forces and keep onstage traffic under control. Presumably, too, a successful work speaks to the audience and patrons, engaging a sense of identity, touching allegorically or literally on themes of social and political significance or engaging shared utopian fantasies. These are only the visible results of such efforts; what goes on behind the scenes, however, is equally important. Theatres must be built, refurbished and rented; seats and boxes must be filled, and a host of professionals—singers, players, dancers, poets, scenographers, painters, composers and choreographers—must be hired and paid for their efforts. Contingencies have to be made in case of disasters—fire, war, illness, death, or the simple failure of a work to please. This sort of risk-taking might well have been tolerable within a court system, where patrons, with ready access to a team of professionals and a supply of funds, not only controlled the purse-strings but also appointed themselves the principal arbiters of taste. Once opera expanded from the courts and acquired the trappings of a commercial enterprise, however, the rules of the game were forever changed, and opera became a fiercely complicated and competitive business. We might wish to imagine that artistic merit was the most important factor in determining the ultimate success of a given work; however, the sheer complexity of producing an opera suggests that other factors were probably more important.
