Gambling the trump card for livening up culture
Gaming sustained opera in the 18th century and may play a vital role as it returns to centre stage
George Orwell argued that "the golden age of the artist was the age of the capitalist. The artist had then escaped from the patron, and had not yet been captured by the bureaucrat". The story I wish to relate here is the transformation of the financing and organisation of opera from aristocratic patronage, to entrepreneurial venture capital, and finally public subsidy. In the process, opera itself has been transformed.
Opera is the most expensive of all artistic forms, combining music, acting, scenery, costumes and sometimes dance. It first appeared in 17th century Italy when aristocratic patrons adopted it as a form of official entertainment, but this system crumbled under the burden of expense, creating conditions for opera houses and a market for entertainment to emerge in the 18th century.
This market connected artists with the public through the opera houses and their ringmasters - the impresarios. Impresarios were basically entrepreneurs who oversaw every detail of performance, from commissioning pieces to mounting them to securing their financial terms.
The impresarios were speculators, in it for the money not the art, but they toiled under great risks - a singer would fall ill, an epidemic would break out, a princely death would occur, or the first performance would fail to meet with audience approval. What made it worth the impresarios' while was not so much the income from performances, but that from a supplementary source: gambling concessions.
Opera-casino combinations were the entertainment complexes of their day and their profits paid for the commissioning of new operas and ballets. They also provided the city-state governments in Italy with a lucrative source of licence fees from gambling concessions. Monte Carlo today is a reminder of this once-customary arrangement.
However, by 1815, the gambling concessions granted to Italy's opera houses had been abolished by a reactionary and conservative Austria. Because the theatres could not survive without these concessions, the state stepped in with a direct subsidy. This was the beginning of opera's reliance on the state that we see up to the present day.