Should Opera Be Subsidized?
Ackerman, Bruce
BEGIN BY considering a thing of indisputable beauty and spiritual depth: the High Mass of the Roman Catholic Church. Does its obvious grandeur mean that the state should subsidize its...
...a half century later, in 1965, it was 108 years...
...To be sure, I can imagine cases in which selective cultural subsidies may be justified without disparaging the equal standing of others...
...To the contrary, I am proud to cast my own lot with modernity, and believe that Freud was onto something very deep in his dismissive treatment of religion...
...90 DISSENT / Summer 1999 nal in the hearts of the grand impresarios—if the subsidies were only multiplied yet further, perhaps the artists might finally liberate themselves from their devout audiences and offer up the prospect of a great operatic renaissance...
...But happily, our politics are sufficiently democratic to prevent quite this level of cultural establishment...
...Haven't they only changed establishments from the old days when it was the partisans of the Enlightenment who were protesting at the state-sponsored glorification of the Mass rather than of Mozart...
...This is, of course, why opera audiences are so remorselessly conservative —demanding, to the dismay of musical directors everywhere, the endless repetition of a ritual cycle of classics...
...Does its obvious grandeur mean that the state should subsidize its performance...
...In short, our subsidies are creating the worst kind of state establishment—in which an increasingly closed canon is remorselessly repeated despite its increasing distance from the anxieties and ultimate concerns of most citizens...
...As much as possible, the liberal state should be neutral on such matters, leaving it to each citizen freely to determine whether he or she should give financial support to the Church of Rome or the one at Bayreuth...
...We are not dealing here with the Romany of Eastern Europe or even the French of Canada, but with an especially obvious case of gratuitous state establishment of a privileged culture—in several senses of the word...
...For those who say yes, the case for a subsidy to the opera may seem straightforward, almost inevitable: if it is appropriate to subsidize the Mass, why not The Magic Flute or Fidelio...
...But there is something to which I am even more committed— and that is opposition to the idea that the state should be in the business of saving souls by monumentalizing my own views of personal salvation in great granite monuments to high culture...
...This question reveals a split within the liberal tradition...
...Hope springs eter*Bruno S. Frey and Werner W Pommerehne, Muses and Markets, pp...
...In 1965, the most "successful" modern opera was Orff 's Die Kluge, which ranked forty-ninth in overall number of performances in 1965, followed by Gershwin's Porgie and Bess (fifty-ninth...
...On the left, civilized Jacobins support the opera as one of the ways of conducting Voltaire's war against the church by other means...
...At that time, the operas of Verdi were performed three times more frequently than the combined total contributed by the top ten "modern" composers of the twentieth century.* While the relentless monotony satisfies the ritualistic desire of the upper class to connect with the grand bourgeoisie of the past, it almost crushes the creative spirit of the artistic souls who are called upon to officiate at these rites...
...Similarly, I can fully endorse a broad-ranging commitment to musical performance and appreciation as part of the state's program of liberal education...
...For many—perhaps most—of the ticketholders, the event is treated as a secularized religious rite...
...BECAUSE I love opera, this liberal rule of abstinence will deprive me of the joys of moral triumphalism on those happy occasions when I come out on top of the political circus...
...This liberalism aims for a more thoroughgoing kind of disestablishment between the state and a specially privileged culture— whether it be defined by the texts and celebrations of the Roman or secular canon...
...Although militant liberals may no longer wish literally to ecraser l'infame, they may hope to seduce her devotees by an ongoing celebration of the glories of the humanist spirit...
...We are fated instead to continue the ritual cycle of Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner endlessly—perhaps providing the artistic avant-garde with enough resources to shock the bourgeoisie with modernistic variations on the Ring, but never with enough resources to enable a truly vibrant and innovative culture...
...Almost, but not quite...
...BRUCE ACKERMAN is professor of law and political science at Yale...
...Most obviously, the people who go to the opera are, by and large, privileged...
...But there is another liberalism, which Americans like myself have been defending recently...
...What, then, could be a more suitable task for militant liberalism than to subsidize the latter, while denying funds to the former...
...Consider, for example, the case of a subordinated minority, which has been condemned for generations to crushing injustice and cultural suppression...
...On the right, civilized religionists support the opera to demonstrate a broad-minded concern with subsidizing all the great achievements of European civilization, not merely the sectarian ones...
...On the one hand, there is the aggressive anticlericalism of the French Enlightenment, best represented by the cultural policies of the French Republic since 1870...
...Whatever else liberalism may be about, it has always stood for the separation of church and state...
...After all, if the state self-consciously, and ostentatiously, takes sides DISSENT / Summer 1999 89 in this conversation, it cannot avoid denigrating the ultimate convictions of many of its dissenting citizens...
...If, for example, a devout religionist protests the state sponsorship of the glorification of the Masonic order in The Magic Flute, how, precisely, are the partisans of state subsidy supposed to respond...
...Given this commitment, subsidy for the opera raises an obvious question: If liberals are opposed to the establishment of religion, how can they justify supporting the establishment of one of the great totems of secular humanism —the operas of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and other lesser saints in the secular canon...
...He is the author, most recently, of The Case Against Lameduck Impeachment and coauthor of The Stakeholder Society...
...Rather than offending the equality of citizens, such a fund reaffirms this core commitment of the liberal state...
...But for liberals like myself, the case for state-supported opera is more complicated...
...If this requires more Spartan operatic performances, at higher prices, I accept this as one of the costs of life in a free society...
...A few facts speak eloquently here: in 1911, the average age of an opera performed in Germanspeaking countries was 53 years...
...The state should get out of the business of bribing its adult citizens to adopt an official version of high culture...
...But, to put it gently, neither of these rationales provides much support for subsidies to the grand opera houses of Europe and America...
...In advocating this wider ranging disestablishment of both religious and secular orthodoxies, I do not wish to trivialize the ultimate importance of their ongoing contest over the meaning of life...
...In contrast to the militant secularism of the French tradition, the neutralist spirit of modern American liberalism strives to prevent either side in the ongoing culture war from using the state's coercive powers of taxation as a weapon in the struggle for our souls...
...But even if I were wrong about this, even if the liberal democratic state of the twentyfirst century found its Mad Max of Bavaria, my objection in principle would remain: it is wrong for the state to glorify any totalizing creed, even my own...
...The Mass seeks to sustain the future of an illusion, in Freud's famous phrase, while The Magic Flute is a triumphant demonstration of the spiritual grandeur of the modern spirit...
...But even then, I will get something more precious out of a rigorous policy of state disestablishment—and that is the construction of a political system in which, as much as possible, no citizen disparages the ultimate convictions held by others...
...These figures are limited to the German-speaking world, and I would be indebted to any reader for more comprehensive, and up-to-date, statistics...
...Although my religious fellow citizens may be making a profound blunder in perpetuating a metaphysical illusion, they are my fellow citizens nonetheless —and what profit is there in disparaging their conscientious convictions by subsidizing my creed while denying funds to theirs...
...We can begin to see why heavy subsidies for the opera seem so uncontroversial in Europe...
...During a magical evening, they are reenacting a holy sacrament connecting them up with the privileged bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century Paris or Vienna, establishing a mystical bond that transcends the mundanities of everyday life...
...On this militant view, there is an easy distinction between the Catholic Mass and The Magic Flute...
...In such a case, there is everything to be said for a special state fund aimed at restoring grievously damaged cultural institutions...
...26-7 (1989...
...A generous state subsidy simply means that they have only to pay $20 or $75 a ticket, rather than $50 or $200...
...In raising this question, I do not wish to question the ultimate value of secular humanism...
...To the contrary, it is precisely because of the importance of this great debate that the state should strive to be neutral in the contest...
...Not only are they rooted in a rich tradition of royal and princely patronage, but they command broad ideological support in these more liberal, democratic days...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
