The phantom of modern opera: how economics and politics affect opera houses’ programming strategies

Despite the surging number of new music compositions by living composers, nonprofit opera houses and symphonies are often reluctant to introduce modern and contemporary operas in their repertoire. In this paper, we consider opera programming and we study to what extent the willingness to stage modern and contemporary operas varies according to economic and political conditions that shape the external context where an opera house operates (i.e., private demand for opera, local community openness to risk, public funding). We test our hypotheses by using panel data regression analysis to examine the programming decisions of 30 opera houses in Italy over five years. The results suggest that pressures from the audience are a major obstacle to artistic renewal in programming. However, specific traits of the local community where theatres are located (i.e., openness to risk) positively moderate the negative effect of market pressures on modern and contemporary programming strategies. In addition, politicians do not counteract audience favor towards more conservative artistic choices: public funding does not stimulate the programming of modern and contemporary music, and only changes in the political coalitions in power increase the likelihood that opera houses’ decision makers will commit to the artistic development of the field.