Opera Philadelphia betrays medium's tragic tradition by reporting vulgar budget surplus

When Anthony Roth Costanzo assumed leadership of Opera Philadelphia, the institution was, magnificently, a mere three weeks away from stopping payroll—a state of breathtaking precarity that promised audiences the rare, exquisite thrill of watching a storied cultural apparatus expire in real-time. It was a fiscal cliff worthy of the great stage, a magnificent tubercular cough echoing through the accounting department. Yet now, in a truly grotesque display of administrative competence, the company is rebounding with a reported surplus, effectively robbing the medium of the agonizing, protracted death that constitutes its only genuine thematic inheritance.

To demand that an opera company achieve solvency is to fundamentally misapprehend the architecture of the form itself; it is a structural betrayal as jarring as a sudden, happy recovery in the final act of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” as tonally disastrous as the inexplicable survival of the entire chorus in Meyerbeer’s frankly unstageable “L'Africaine,” and as deeply insulting to the viewer's intelligence as the suggestion that anyone but Snooki was the true emotional anchor of MTV’s seminal 2009 masterwork “Jersey Shore.” An opera company that can afford to keep the lights on is merely a municipal utility with a string section, utterly devoid of the romantic desperation required to properly render nineteenth-century grief.