Having grown up in a world full of constant technological advancements and ever-evolving cultural trends, most students see opera as an art form that is a relic of a distant past. But, why exactly is this? Why do we feel more disconnected from opera than we do from other art forms?
Firstly, opera tends to seem out of reach for most students. Despite it being possible to find recorded versions for free, or at least cheaply, online, I think it’s fair to say that the best way to experience it is in person, and this is where part of the problem lies, because live opera is typically quite an expensive and inaccessible art form. Although the Royal Opera House in London does sell a limited number of £10 tickets for their performances, the other costs associated with a trip down to London quickly add up, especially if you are not from there. And if you want to see live opera in Sheffield it is pretty difficult since Sheffield Theatres usually only receive touring opera productions for a night or two making it much harder to fit a trip in.
Personally, I think that this is part of the reason why students are likely to be more engaged with other theatrical art forms; touring musicals tend to be received for at least a week and plays are also likely to run for longer than a couple of nights which makes it easier to find a date that works for you to go to the theatre. Additionally, there being more performances means that there are more tickets available overall, so it is easier to get a cheaper ticket for a play or musical than it is to get one for an opera.
Moreover, the whole idea of opera feels quite inaccessible for lots of students since it is an acquired taste that you have to work hard at in order to really like it. Therefore, you have to be really open to the idea of getting to know and enjoy different operas, which isn’t exactly made easy by the English educational system. Even as someone who took A-Level music, I had very little exposure to opera at
school. At A-Level, I think I studied one opera (Mozart’s The Magic Flute – I would recommend this as a starting opera as it’s got some great music) and before that the only exposure that I’d had at school was going to see Hansel and Gretel (a German opera) in primary school, yet this is more exposure than the vast majority of students will have had.
Therefore, I believe that the belief that opera is inaccessible for students comes from the fact that it is so different from what we are used to seeing and hearing. One of the major differences is that operas are rarely in English because most of them weren’t originally performed to audiences in England. As a native English speaker, I am used to being able to easily understand what is being said when I go to see something at the theatre but if I went to see an opera, I would have to work harder to understand what was happening because I would need to read the subtitles whilst keeping track of what the performers are doing on stage. This means that watching an opera isn’t a particularly relaxing experience, especially because I think it’s harder to watch a subtitled theatre performance than a subtitled film or TV show since in the theatre, the subtitles are physically further away from the action than they are on screen.
I also think that our easy access to media online makes us less inclined to watch anything live because it is much cheaper to just watch something at home, so it doesn’t matter as much if you don’t like it. Although many students aren’t really bothered about opera, I would be very surprised if there weren’t some enthusiasts within the student community, so I think it would be amazing if someone
set up an opera society. I think that there are two ways in which this could be done. It could be an opera appreciation society so that opera lovers could explore their shared interest together and even try to get more students exposed to this centuries-old art form. Alternatively, it could work more like SUTCo or SUPAS in that it could be a performance society. I think this would be a great way to get more students engaged with opera because tickets to the performances would be cheap and the performances would probably be on campus, making them much more accessible than professional opera productions.
Overall, I think that it would be great if more students enjoyed opera however this is very unlikely to happen unless there is a massive societal shift over how we see it. Personally, I think that operas offer some great stories and some absolutely beautiful music, so it is a shame that today’s students, myself included lots of the time, tend to pass over them in favour of other art forms.
