Word: mets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Met tour hasn't always been an artistic or financial asset, even as recently as Rudolf Bing's regime. "The tour is the albatross hung around the neck of the manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Eventually, I suppose, it will simply fall off from sheer economic weight... Whatever we do, the tour is artistically a scandal," Bing wrote in his memoirs...
What has happened in the intervening years is that the Met's budgetary troubles have forced a reevaluation of the national tour. It might once have been a luxury that helped bring the Met closer to the national audiences gathered around radios every Saturday afternoon to hear opera broadcasts; it has become--along with the opera blitz on public television--a critical part of the Met's campaign to raise money across the country...
...boon to audiences like Boston's is huge. The seven productions the Met has taken on tour this year represent the best of its repertory. Boston audiences still must endure the conditions of Hynes Auditorium--universally referred to as a "barn," with poor acoustics and bad sight lines. But in 1981 the Met in Boston will move to the refurbished Music Hall, and the last major advantage the New York house can claim will disappear...
...Met's financial need to court its national audience goes beyond the obvious pressure of inflation which strains cultural institutions of every variety. Of all the performing arts opera is the most extravagant--combining as it does the costs of a major theater and a symphony orchestra with the fees of prima donnas and temperamental tenors. An opera house cannot contain more than a few thousand seats without forcing singers' voices beyond their capacity, limiting the revenue available from ticket sales. The Met is squeezing as much as it can out of its ticket-buyers; at $40 an orchestra seat...
Even at these rates box office revenue simply doesn't cover the Met's costs, so its management has turned to audiences outside of the house to try to make up the difference. Over the last two years--during which the Met budget has been relatively untroubled--the national campaign has succeeded in a big way. The "Texaco-Metropolitan Opera Radio Network" has been broadcasting Saturday matinees from the Metropolitan Opera House for the last 39 years, but the series of live telecasts begun in 1976 has proved a spectacular stimulant to contributions...