Why does only Carmen sell?

Carmen opens tonight at Her Majesty’s Theatre, and it’s selling like hotcakes.

That’s wonderful. It’s also a puzzle. Earlier this year State Opera South Australia staged La Cenerentola, and in August Hansel and Gretel won five-star reviews. The music in both is every bit as great as Bizet’s. Both were a much harder sell.

So last week I asked on Instagram: what makes you buy a ticket to the opera? And what would get you to take a chance on one you don’t know?

The answers were honest. Familiarity came first. People like a sure thing, especially when they’re spending real money on a night out. Others said curiosity needs to be encouraged, and one person suggested a regular radio segment introducing music people don’t know yet. A few asked for more Australian artists on stage. (Our Carmen is Adelaide soprano Charlotte Kelso, State Opera’s Resident Artist, so I’d like to think we’re listening.)

Familiarity is a fair answer. Much of what we watch and hear is now chosen by algorithms designed to give us more of what we already like. They’re very good at it. They’re much less good at introducing us to something we didn’t know we’d love.

Opera asks something different of us. You sit in a room with strangers, put your phone away and pay full attention to real people making real, unamplified sound. It’s deliciously inefficient. And most people who come through the door are hooked.

Opera has never survived on ticket sales, anywhere, in four hundred years. It is incredibly resource-intensive to bring so many specialised, world-beatingly skilled people together in one place: 50 to 80 musicians in the orchestra below the stage, a cast of 10 or 12, a chorus of 30 to 50, and behind them the technical crew, mechs, stage management, hair, wigs, wardrobe, make-up and lighting. The list goes on and on.

And how do you put a price tag on that? Opera is the very embodiment of human endeavour, ingenuity and collaboration. Governments, patrons, kings and queens have underwritten it for centuries for the same reason we fund schools and hospitals.

That support is also what lets a company take you somewhere new. Think of the final trio of Der Rosenkavalier. Or the Hymn to the Sun that opens Mascagni’s Iris: it starts with a solo double bass, spreads through the orchestra and breaks into a sunrise with the whole chorus in full voice. Few people here know it, and we should all hear it. Or “Esser madre è un inferno” from Cilea’s L’Arlesiana, which I conducted at Opera Holland Park. The opera has a tenor aria Pavarotti made famous, yet I’m fairly sure it has never been heard in this country.

This is all great music. To program it, we need to build trust with our audience.

Every sure thing was new once. Carmen got a cool reception at its Paris premiere in 1875, and Bizet died three months later, never knowing what it would become.

So come to Carmen. Then take a chance on the next one you don’t know.

And keep telling me: what would get you through the door?