Balancing Finances and Audience Interest

The National Arts Centre was created as a venue for what were believed to be the classics in music, theatre, dance, and opera. With G. Hamilton Southam at the helm of the project, the NAC set forth in establishing a hub for who he deemed to be elite artists, such as Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Rossini. While the orchestra was very successful in the early years and continues to be a successful enterprise in present day, opera's success steadily declined over the years. Opera is now a rarity at the NAC. 

Throughout the 1970s, the NAC put on a variety of expensive productions, including the operas associated with Festival Canada. Each season, these operas found to be incapable of generating enough revenue to account for the cost of production. Reviewing the annual reports and posters show that one way in which they sought to address the high cost of these productions, they often performed certain opears many times over a number years. As a result, increasingly fewer people attended the festival each year. This is shown in the audience attendance percentages documented in the NAC annual reports. Although attendance was always quite healthy for an arts organization, over decade studied here attendentance dropped from a high 86 percent in 1971/72 to 79.3 percent by 1979. Despite a peak year of 89.3 percent in 1975/76, the overall decline in attendance increasingly impacted the NAC's bottom line. Opera, it seems, was not a financially viable genre to stage at the Centre. 

O'Toole's critique of opera at the festival points to two issues with the NAC: subpar administration and lack of interest (1979, 55). Whether or not this lack of interest was for opera as a genre is not entirely clear. But it may very well be that part of the problem can be found in zeroing in on the impact that some administrative decisions may have had on audience interest as it relates to reproducing operas from one season to the next. While the NAC's administration may have seen this as having potential financial advantage for the NAC - who may have sought to recoup their expenses on sets and costumes through a second production - the audience may not have wanted to see a second staging of a particular opera. Not only did the nation's capital city not have a long history of opera, but Ottawa had not cultivated an audience for the genre. Thus, while repetition of opera productions might work in a city with an established audience, the re-staging of an opera from season-to-season might not have proved successful in Ottawa.

While many questions remain about the declining interest in opera and its inability to break even financially, it is clear that this lack of success was never due to subpar performance.