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Opera management


Opera management is the management of the processes by which opera is delivered to audiences. A multifaceted task, it involves managing an opera company, primarily the singers and musicians who perform the operas, but in many cases also managing the opera house in which the company performs.

Opera is a complex art form involving high fixed costs and requiring complex management. In addition to the singers and musicians who form the core of the company its production requires scenery and costumes and sometimes dancers and non-singing actors. Fixed costs in today's opera organizations—keeping many of the singers and musicians on year-round contracts, and if managing their own theatre, the cost of workers needed to create and maintain the sets and costumes as well as the cost of maintaining and running the building—combined with the costs of individual productions, make opera the most expensive of the performing arts. However, even in the 19th century when opera was largely run by individual impresarios rather than large organisations, opera management as a profession was characterised as "a devouror of the fortunes of the victims it has tempted by its seductions".Frederick Gye, who turned the Royal Italian Opera in Covent Garden into one of London's premiere opera houses in the 19th century and who shaped the careers of many famous singers, described opera management as a "dreadful business".

The earliest operas were privately performed and financed by the noble families who commissioned them, often to mark great court occasions. One such example was Marco da Gagliano's La Flora, performed in 1628 at the Medici Palace in Florence to celebrate the marriage of Margherita de' Medici and Odoardo Farnese, Duke of Parma. Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena, the wife of Cosimo II de' Medici and the mother of the bride, took an active role in the planning of the production. She secured the services of the musicians and singers, attended the rehearsals, and according to musicologist Kelley Harness, may well have contributed to the development of the plot as well.


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