Glyndebourne will champion traditional conservative opera over flashy attempts at innovation after concluding that “sex and drugs and rock‘n’roll” failed to pull in younger audiences.
Sebastian Schwarz, who was appointed general director of the opera company in November, said that previous attempts to be risqué had not worked.
He said that Glyndebourne, in West Sussex, was unlike other venues where traditional productions might be “booed off stage” for being conservative.
“Let’s look at the word ‘conservative’ as a positive thing,” he said. “Sometimes we want to conserve a certain sense of beauty and there’s nothing bad about that. At the same time, there’s nothing bad about trying to find new ways of telling the story. Both approaches can go wrong sometimes, but I’m definitely not somebody who only wants to see blood and other liquids on stage.”
The Royal Opera House attracted controversy recently when it warned audiences to expect sex and violence in Lucia di Lammermoor. About 40 people returned their tickets.
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The warning was the result of a bigger furore last year when its performance of Guillaume Tell was interrupted by booing in protest at a rape scene.
Gus Christie, the chairman of Glyndebourne, said that an attempt to woo younger audiences with racy content failed in 2005, when it commissioned Tangier Tattoo, an “operatic thriller”.
“It was sex and drugs and rock‘n’roll in Tangiers and we didn’t get many 18 to 30-year-olds in,” Mr Christie said. “We got a lot of 60-year-olds thinking they wanted to be a bit risqué. It backfired. It was an experiment that didn’t work, but it was worth giving it a go. We learnt in the process.”
Mr Christie said that it was more important to demystify opera so that it no longer resembled an intimidating and elitist art form. The best way to do so was through education and cheaper ticket prices, he said.
Mr Schwarz was born in Germany and was previously deputy artistic director of the Theatre an der Wien in Vienna. He said that he was committed to finding new audiences. “We do need to make sure we have the right performers to go along with that and the directors who are able to pick up on what audiences want to see now, or what they should see,” he added.
