Read on to discover some of the truly bizarre ways that promoters have gone about advertising opera through the years...
Advertising opera... the birth of publicity, promotion and spin
When opera was first invented, at the turn of the 17th century, it had no need to promote itself. It was a lavish entertainment put on by Italian princes and dukes to impress their neighbours and rivals, and if you were on the guest list, you were in the in-crowd. But after the Teatro San Cassiano in Republican Venice opened its doors in 1637, opera became a commercial venture. Other enterprising impresarios began to open theatres and needed to make sure they were consistently full in order to make a profit. From now on, opera would require publicity, promotion and spin.
There have been moments in the history of opera where composers enjoyed such high social status that merely announcing a premiere would suffice. The levels of anticipation awaiting an opera by the mature Verdi, for example, were high. In today’s world, however, opera is a harder sell. It no longer enjoys prominence as a mainstream form of entertainment, and there is no steady production line of eagerly awaited new works; rather, companies must find ways of enticing audiences to watch operas that they may have seen multiple times. So, which strategies work? How do you get a first timer through the door? Which advertising initiatives are brilliantly imaginative, and which have struck a decidedly bum note?
Advertising opera... prominent posters
From the earliest days of opera, posters played a vital role in attracting audiences. In 18th-century London, opera posters were limited to text, with singers’ names in larger font than the composer’s, an early indicator of the marketability of star performers. In the modern age, a singer’s name or image can still be a draw. A particularly striking 2015 Royal Opera House poster for Giordano’s Andrea Chénier of an unshaven, moody-looking Jonas Kaufmann against the background of a tricolore showed that opera does heartthrobs just as well as Hollywood.
Following developments in colour printing in the late-19th century, opera posters became art works in their own right. The publishing firm Ricordi invested huge sums in the promotion of Puccini’s operas, commissioning exquisite posters from the leading graphic artists of the day, such as Adolfo Hohenstein and Ludovico Metlicovitz, which remain instantly recognisable. These featured a key dramatic or evocative moment from the drama: Tosca placing a crucifix on Scarpia’s chest; Madam Butterfly gazing out at the spring blossom, awaiting Pinkerton’s return. Later, 20th-century opera companies with big budgets sometimes commissioned the services of world-famous artists: David Hockney for San Francisco Opera’s The Rake’s Progress; Marc Chagall for the Metropolitan Opera’s Die Zauberflöte.
Advertising opera... flyers and postcards
Over the years, opera companies have worked ever harder to get the message directly into the hands of the potential audience member. Ricordi was, again, a leader in this approach, setting up a large international network of shops that sold postcards and themed memorabilia to advertise the latest works by the company’s favoured composers. In the 1930s, when the Sadler’s Wells opera company first launched, audience members were encouraged to leave flyers on Tube-train seats or insert them into popular library books. It was a hit-and-miss approach, but who knows whether it worked?
Advertising opera... nightclubs, cocaine and the elusive youth market
Assumptions that the opera audience is dying out are widespread but overstated. (Such warnings have been circulating for at least a century and opera’s oft-predicted demise has never come about.) Nevertheless, companies remain in constant pursuit of the elusive youth market. In 2003, the Royal Opera took the quirky approach of distributing flyers at the Ministry of Sound nightclub, using a ROH logo that mimicked the club’s own, with the slogans ‘dance music’ (for ballet), ‘soul music’ (opera), and ‘house music’ (the opera house). Again, it is not known whether any clubbers actually turned up.
Edgy productions are sometimes seen as a way to attract the young. When a Glyndebourne production of La bohème in 2000 featured cocaine use, a critic for The Observer wrote: ‘The tragic La bohème, first performed in Turin in 1896, is one of the most romantic works in the classical canon but until now had few points of reference for younger people’. It was a bold claim for an opera that is almost entirely concerned with the experience of being young.
Advertising opera... royals and famous faces
The possibility of seeing someone famous at the opera has always been a draw for audiences. Queen Victoria used to pop into Covent Garden mid-show, attracting a society crowd who were keen to associate with her. By the 1950s, it was foreign presidents, princes and ambassadors who lined Floral Street in their limousines.
Today, however, people revere a different sort of celebrity. In 2019 English National Opera (ENO) laid out the red carpet for TV personalities such as Davina McCall, Holly Willoughby and Alan Carr in return for posts on Instagram, hoping that the influencers would attract a new crowd.
Advertising opera... sex sells!
Sex sells, with opera as with other products. ENO took this to extremes with a bold billboard advertising campaign in 2012. Posters pasted liberally around the Tube network bore the slogan ‘Don Giovanni. Coming Soon’, accompanied by a photograph of an opened condom packet. Although the company defended the advert as ‘brilliant’ and ‘funny’, reviewer Mark Berry, on the website Opera Today, called the marketing ‘puerile and needlessly irritating’, and noted that the condom picture was ill-chosen since ‘Don Giovanni would seem an unlikely candidate to have employed them’. Perhaps all publicity was good publicity, though, with the campaign drawing the attention of newspapers as far away as the Los Angeles Times.
... and so does sport
There have also been numerous attempts to sell opera by reference to other activities with a large following. In the 1920s, for example, the short-lived British National Opera Company decided that associating opera with sport would make for an excellent marketing campaign, organising a photo opportunity for the South African cricket team at a ‘Wagner evening’ after a day’s play at Lords. The team’s vice-captain was quoted as saying that he would be ashamed to return to South Africa without attending at least one opera in Britain. Decades later, the use of ‘Nessun dorma’ as the BBC’s theme tune for Italia 90 undoubtedly gave opera’s popularity a boost, even if some critics scoffed snootily at the prospect of any football fans seeking out a complete performance of Turandot.
Advertising opera... the birth of social media and promotional videos
In our own age, social media has given opera companies an additional weapon in their publicity arsenal, allowing them to communicate directly with the prospective customer. At the time of writing, the Royal Opera House Twitter/X account has over 249,000 followers and ENO over 125,000. In 2009 the Royal Opera even commissioned The Twitter Opera, featuring a libretto composed entirely of public tweets. It is not a work that has entered the company’s repertoire – perhaps because technology moves so fast that the conceit swiftly became passé, though critics had their own, rather less charitable, explanations. Digital technology has, however, been a boon to opera companies. Many now produce imaginative promotional videos, including trailers and discussions which are accessible on YouTube.
Advertising opera... unexpected venues
Putting opera on in unexpected places can sometimes catch the attention of a potential customer who is new to opera. In the 1920s, the Carl Rosa Opera Company put on a series of short opera scenes in front of surprised diners at a Lyons Corner House near Leicester Square. And in 2004 ENO put on Act Three of Die Walküre at Glastonbury, a fun and not entirely illogical move, given the aesthetic affinities between Wagner and heavy metal. The V&A’s exhibition ‘Opera: Passion, Power and Politics’ (2017), meanwhile, hoped to catch the attention of art patrons usually drawn to shows about fashion or design. Telling the history of opera via seven significant premieres and eschewing all the usual clichés about the art form, it managed to present opera, in the words of Anna Maria Barry in Opera, as ‘political, radical, iconoclastic’.
Advertising opera... reality TV
Although it is rare to see a full operatic performance on television nowadays, opera has sometimes featured in the reality TV format we might call ‘unlikely people having a go’. ITV’s Popstar to Operastar (2010) prompted frustration among opera singers. Tenor Ian Storey told The Times that the programme was exploiting opera ‘to grab ratings and make money’, while making fun of it and undermining the seriousness of the craft. More positively, the BBC’s Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne, broadcast in the same year, saw a group of sceptical, disaffected teenagers taking part in a new opera by Julian Philips called Knight Crew. By the end of the project, the participants had learnt the value of working hard and taking something seriously, as well as finding a connection to the subject matter. As Malone said, opera is ‘very intense with lots of death. Teenagers get that.’
Gimmicks aren't always a winning strategy
As the ultimate visually and aurally sumptuous art form, opera is surely a dream to the advertising creative, offering numerous ‘hooks’ that are ripe for exploitation. A warning, however. Using gimmicks to promote opera, either by attempting to sell it like pop music or ‘sexing it up’, is not always a winning strategy when it comes to impressing newcomers, and risks alienating established enthusiasts at the same time.
As the critic Rupert Christiansen wrote in 2016, ‘The harder you try to sell opera as groovy, the greater the suspicion and resistance.’ Rather than selling opera as something it is not, a far more positive strategy is surely to tell prospective audiences what an opera actually is: a good story, set to great music
