The Financial Impact of the Coronavirus on the Arts - Patrick Summers

Orphan World
The Financial Impact of the Coronavirus on the Arts
By Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music Director,
Houston Grand Opera
Moments into the prologue to one of the great operas, Pagliacci, we are asked by
one of the characters to, “consider our souls”, as he promises us a drama full of all
of the reality of humanity, something unforgettably true. We are living through
something all too true right now in 2021. A year ago, all of us in the arts had a
thousand wishes and plans and now we have just one: survival.
It is amazing how much money can be saved by an opera company by not
producing opera. Shut down from live performance and working with a smaller
staff producing a smaller product, why worry about a negative financial impact
that will be $20 million between now and 2024? How could we possibly know this
figure in early 2021, only a year into an ongoing pandemic? What does “loss” even
mean in a field like opera that only loses money? Read on if interested.
.
We tend to view finances in the arts as we do aging in life: something inevitable
that arrives like a punishment. But what is true of money in the arts is also true of
aging: aging is an ongoing accumulation of wisdom, just as money is energy for
and from creative ideas. We are built to gain oldness not simply to move through
youth and settle into quietness, but to use our spiritual capital, and that is what
money is for in the arts.
Houston Grand Opera is ‘in better shape than most’, we constantly communicate,
and it is thankfully true – but it is also quite misleading. What this reassuring
statement means, when considering all the souls, is that around the country
orchestras, opera companies, and professional theaters are all steaming towards an
iceberg, but HGO has managed more capably than most to slow down its own
Titanic. The iceberg remains, however, and there is no ignoring it, no burying its
dangers in the rollout of the vaccine, no romanticizing, and no more misplaced
overuse of the word, ‘unprecedented’.

The future of the arts in the United States, from a financial standpoint, is very
daunting indeed.
The point at which art and money meet is thought to be a no man’s land for artists.
We either aren’t supposed to know anything about it, or to stay ‘above it’ if we do.
The reality is that a year into this pandemic, artists are more acutely aware of
money than at any time in history.
Every freelance artist, which means nearly every musician, opera singer and actor
in the world and those unseen artists in professions that support them, are broken
by a year of no income, and many have sought work elsewhere to keep themselves
afloat. A few dozen film actors make enormous incomes, creating a false sense of
luxury around their glamorized profession. Actually, most people who attempt an
acting career fail within a few years, and even many who stay barely get by.
Most opera singers, too, live gig-to-gig, and when the engagements all stopped in
March of 2020, they were stuck, many of them having already paid for expensive
corporate housing months in advance, which was money they had to eat, and the
outlay of cash eliminated their savings. They stay in the profession for years at a
time because they love it, but love won’t pay your mortgage or the debts you’ve
accrued to keep your kids from knowing what happened to what you used to sing.
As well, people who work in industries supporting the arts infrastructure:
restaurants, parking attendants, ushers, theatrical technicians of enormous expertise
and experience, administrators, assistants, accountants, therapists both physical and
mental, are all severely afflicted by the shutdown of the arts.
Perhaps this cliché will a merciful and overdue ending, but prior to the pandemic
there was still a widespread sense that artists should work for the love of the art,
and the ‘starving artist’ is embedded in our culture as something romantic and
positive. The tragedy of La bohème is not that they were all starving artists, but
that they were all rich kids pretending to be artists without any of the discipline and
drive to do so. They lived as bohemians, but when they are confronted with
something real, like a very sick girl, they have no idea what to do. The helplessness
of each of them is the opera’s tragedy.
One of the biggest challenges of the arts is the labyrinthine way the arts are funded
in the United States. And when one concentrates too fully on what opera costs, it
makes absolutely no sense at all—you can quickly talk yourself out of its efficacy,

which is one of the daunting realities of having not had live performances for so
long: people get used to it.
It is still difficult even for longtime opera patrons and board members to fully
grasp that a sold-out Brown Theater at Houston Grand Opera pays somewhere
around 23% of the cost of raising the curtain on that performance. This has been
true for decades and presumably will remain true for decades longer. This means
that there is no performance of La Boheme or Carmen or La traviata, no matter
who is starring in it, that will pay for itself, nor will it pay for half of itself. These
operas are performed around the world because people love them, not because they
make money.
And a performance of any of those operas at a high artistic level requires a set of
artisans who have worked their entire lives for the privilege of the ability to
perform them. To state the absolutely obvious: one of the other adverse effects of
the coronavirus pandemic is that it may take years for there ever to be a sold-out
theater of anything. But for insiders to our organization, it is always important to
remember that we sell tickets to raise donations; we do not raise donations to sell
tickets. As an art, opera is entirely dependent on contributions from the wealthy
and the generous-minded, but the art itself is for everyone, a distinction that has
been difficult for many to draw.
The perennial problem for opera has existed for a very long time: there is little else
to cut, and all companies are demanding more and more of fewer donors. That so
much of our repertoire is well over a century old, and not enough of it from our
own lifetime, is a separate but related issue. It is the generosity of a few, all over
the country, that have kept the arts alive in the United States, and there can never
be too much gratitude for each of them, for they have done heroic work and will
have to do more.
We have an aging audience, but that was also true in the 1950s and the 1980s. It is
generally later in life when a person or family of means has the asset base to be
able to give significant money away, and the pandemic has laid a host of problems
at the feet of older people that would never have been predicted a year ago – an
operatic/classical music audience tends to be older because it is an art of accrual:
many people lean towards deeper artistic experiences as they age.
The past year, in terms of the lives and health of artists themselves, has all been
prologue. The worst is ahead of us, which makes fundraising right now all the
more imperative. For working artists, for the many orchestral musicians,

freelancing singers, actors and actresses, visual artists, and all those who support
them in technical fields, we aren’t talking about a simple paring down of their
savings. We are talking about immediate food and housing insecurity. We are
talking about a whole generation of artists leaving the field for an elusive greener
pasture, and it is a job market packed with the newly unemployed from all sectors.
We are talking about an existential crisis unlike what anyone outside of wartime
has ever experienced, with all of war’s accompanying mental health perils.
It is worth remembering that all non-profits have an annual goal of getting to zero.
We don’t exist to either lose or make money. A non-profit arts company is about
managing loss, not acquiring gain. This is always a difficult concept for those in
businesses for whom the entire goal is profit, and someone is forever re-inventing
the broken wheel that opines a way for opera to pay its own bills with ticket sales.
It takes a generous and mature spirit to hold the belief that Bach and Mozart and
Renoir and Shakespeare are good for humanity, that we are better with them than
without them. Without that generosity though, which is a generosity of mind and
heart, money can’t do much.
It is the emotional and spiritual connection to the art that keeps it alive, and this has
never been truer than a year into a pandemic that has reordered the world.
If having financial means does not make the world more grandly humane, more
humorous, more relatable, or simply more beautiful, then what on earth is money
for?
Yes, the arts weathered two World Wars in the first half of the 20 th Century, and a
global depression between them, but there were very few performing arts
companies in the United States at that time. The New York Philharmonic and the
Boston Symphony are the oldest arts institution in our country, founded in 1842
and 1881 respectively. The Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, and the
Minnesota Orchestra followed in 1883, 1891,and 1903. Only a few other
companies were founded prior to the post-WWII boom, when arts companies
proliferated across the country, including Houston Grand Opera and Lyric Opera
of Chicago, both in 1955. All of them, old and young, are now in peril.
HGO’s planned seasons of the future are, in non-profit style, planned to get to zero,
but we will fall far short of zero for a number of reasons: it will take time to get
fund-raising back to pre-pandemic levels, and though ticket sales pay relatively
little of our budget, they do pay some and those levels will be low for a long time.

Our generous donors will be called on from all sectors for their support, and from
areas of life many would consider more essential than the arts. The ability of some
people to donate has been diminished by the pandemic’s economic affect. This
does not even touch those patrons who are longing to return to live performance,
who are tired of watching events on televisions and computers, who miss the social
world of the arts, or simply those in need of music. As everyone fights to stay
healthy, loneliness has settled into so many homes.
That glorious prologue to Pagliacci, where he sings “consider our souls”, says a lot
in a few beautiful soaring phrases. We need to hear it again. And again. And
again.
E voi, piuttosto che le nostre povere gabbane d’istrioni
Le nostr’anime considerate, poiche siam uomini di carne a d’ossa
e che di quest’orfano mondo al pari di voi spiriamo l’aere!
And you, therefore, instead of our poor players clothes,
Consider our souls, for we are men of flesh and bone and, like you,
are breathing the same air of this orphan world.
Patrick Summers
April 19, 2021
Houston, Texas