by the Coro di Melos, technical and scientific committee
Nineteenth-century engraving of the façade of the Teatro alla Scala. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Those who complain about the price of opera, and those who defend it, usually argue without knowing what it was like before. It is worth telling, because the nineteenth-century price system was a sophisticated social machine, and the comparison with today holds surprises in both directions.
The heart of the system was the box, and the box was not bought at the box office: it was bought from the notary. In the historic Italian theatres, La Scala included, the boxes were the private property of families, purchased, inherited, given as dowry and resold like real estate, complete with deeds and condominium disputes; the box holders were, literally, the co-owners of the theatre. The box was a family drawing room overlooking the house: people dined there, played cards, received visitors during the performance, and the music served as background to social life, with all due respect to the sacred silence that would arrive only with Toscanini. The ticket for the evening was another matter, and gave the right to the stalls, where one stood or sat on benches, or to the gallery, the paradise of rock-bottom prices, where anyone went up: students, artisans, the paid claque, and the ferocious fans who decided careers. The classic studies on the economics of opera, those of John Rosselli on impresarios and the market, show a system in which the theatre was at once luxury real estate, a business at risk and a public square, held up by the interplay among the three levels.
The comparison with today overturns a couple of commonplaces. First: relative to wages, the cheap seat of the time was no more expensive than the gallery today, and the nineteenth-century opera house was attended by social groups that today do not set foot in it; but not because of the price: because of habit, since opera was the everyday popular culture, the kind that produced novelties every season. Second: the rich seat of the time was far more expensive than today, because it bought a status that no modern seat gives any more. The gap has narrowed from both sides: contemporary opera is at once less exclusive at the top and less popular at the bottom, flattened onto a cultured middle class that is ageing along with it.
The operating conclusion, for theatres, is suggested by history itself: the nineteenth-century system worked because it differentiated ferociously, making those who wanted status pay dearly and those who wanted only the music pay very little for admission. The theatres that today experiment with youth-priced evenings, the last seats for little and the galas for a lot, are inventing nothing: they are returning to the model that filled the houses when opera was alive. The gallery is not nostalgia: it is a business model tested for two centuries. All it takes is to really reopen it.