Culture Suffering : Opera Now a Phantom in Argentina

For generations, the Teatro Colon was the cultural pride of Argentina, a stately symbol of a kind of honorary membership in the club of sophisticated European nations.

Covering a full city block, the elegant, 82-year-old opera house played host to the likes of Enrico Caruso and Richard Strauss, entertaining genteel audiences of 3,500. Crystal chandeliers, Attic-Greek pillars, luxury boxes with bronze gates and plush seats set a tone more at home in Rome or Paris than Latin America.

Now the Teatro Colon, humbled and broke, has canceled its season-opening opera, “Aida,” and is hurriedly rescheduling and shrinking its entire season, a victim of the economic vise now tightening around every facet of Argentine life. Some doubt whether the Colon will have any season at all.

Cultural Damage

The plight of the Colon is just one example of the cultural damage inflicted by Argentina’s worst economic turmoil on record.

The ramifications of what local citizens call simply la crisis affect nearly every form of the free expression that returned here when the armed forces went back to the barracks in 1983.

The film industry, which has won international acclaim for studies of the human costs of the last military dictatorship, is now barely able to mount any new productions. Book publishers in Buenos Aires, once a major Latin American literary center, are issuing few new titles--and limiting sales because they bring losses. Daring young newspapers are losing money, musicians can’t find work.

Germinating for Years

As happened in other aspects of Argentine life, the cultural crisis was germinating for years as short-term economic plans failed to deal with underlying structural problems in the economy. It all came apart in February when the latest plan collapsed. Inflation has surged to a staggering 70% for the month of May alone, and the dollar rose from 17 australs to nearly 200 as confidence vanished.

“We had been living in a more or less normal crisis,” film director Fernando Solanas said. “Now, we are living in an abnormal crisis.”

Although the Teatro Colon caters to the well-to-do, it has not escaped the devastation. After a yearlong, $5-million renovation, the municipally owned theater planned a gala reopening May 24 with Verdi’s “Aida,” in honor of the theater’s first performance, also of “Aida,” on the same day in 1908.

Delays in rebuilding the stage, which workers blame on an inept management, and festering labor problems and salary demands by the huge work force of 1,500 combined to kill the production. The inflation explosion and the decline of the austral then forced the city government to order the theater to cut down the ambitious season of 11 operas, including “Faust,” “The Barber of Seville” and “Don Giovanni.”

The theater sold season tickets at prices in March that equaled $40 per show for the finest seats down to $8. Due to inflation and the dollar’s rise since then, those tickets would now be $10 and $2--with the theater absorbing the loss. No one is sure if a reduced season can be organized at all.

“When the theater had problems in the past, it was a matter of great public interest,” said Eugenio Scavo, the Colon’s press chief for the past 30 years. “Now, nobody cares. People are more worried about getting by day-to-day. We have arrived at a level of decadence that we never knew before.”

Depends on Government

Unlike American cultural institutions, the Colon depends almost entirely on government funds for its $2-million annual budget, only 30% of which comes from ticket revenues. Argentina, long used to state control, lacks a tradition of private support for the arts. Its 11-year-old Teatro Colon Foundation raises just $200,000 a year, mainly for scholarships for singers and dancers, some of whom have emigrated.

If the government allowed tax deductions for contributions to the theater, “we would have 3,000 members, not 300,” foundation director Carlos Yanez said.

The mentality of depending on the state is pervasive. The theater doesn’t even have a souvenir shop and seems to make no serious effort to generate its own funds. The popular tours cost 40 australs, now about 25 cents.

Meanwhile, the vast staff absorbs punishing losses in buying power. Ernesto Ferreiro, the 48-year-old chief of the hairdressing section with 21 years at the theater, earns 12,000 australs a month, now about $65. A few years ago, his salary was the equivalent of several hundred dollars.

“I live more in the theater than at home; I live for this. We don’t go on stage, but we enjoy and suffer with those out there,” he said. Glancing at some of the 200 elaborate headdresses and wigs created for “Aida,” he added, “It is very painful to see this happening after so many months of work.”

“It is not that we are leaving our culture behind, but that it is being dragged down with the rest of the country,” he said.

The convulsions at the Colon have generated malaise and paralysis. Soloist ballet dancer Raul Gatto, 38, said the 88-member dance troupe has been demanding since March that the theater schedule some ballet events this year, to no avail. “An artist without work is a dead artist,” he said.

The Colon is the world’s third-largest opera house, built in French Renaissance style by European artisans who formed part of a great wave of Argentine immigration at the turn of the century. Rose, yellow, red and brown marble used in the construction were imported from Portugal, Italy and Belgium. Handcrafted mosaic tile floors, brilliant stained-glass windows and ceiling lights provide warm, natural light in the vast foyer and U-shaped Golden Hall surrounding the main staircase, where the wealthy showed off their finery between acts.

The Colon is a self-contained artistic city, providing every need for its productions. The costume department has a stock of 75,000 outfits ready for use. The theater has two permanent orchestras along with the ballet troupe and the chorus.

The auditorium includes three levels of private boxes above the main floor, and 10 “widow’s boxes,” enclosed by metal grates. In days past, mourning widows and those who chose not to be seen could enter the boxes privately and then open the grates when the lights went down to watch the performance. The acoustics are judged to be among the best anywhere.

Others Suffering, Too

In the labyrinthine backstage world, the scene more closely reflects modern-day Argentina. The walls in the three-floor sub-basements are plastered with posters of Carlos Saul Menem of the labor-based Peronist party, who won a landslide victory in the May 14 presidential election.

The staff held a symbolic reopening on May 24, gathering on the front steps to sing the national anthem and declaring that they want the show to go on.

Other arts are suffering just as severely.

Solanas, who won the best-director prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for his movie, “Sur” (South), said Argentine cinema has lived through years of steady deterioration, despite the increasing quality of its work. The economic explosion of the last few weeks merely piles more obstacles in front of an already ailing industry, he said.

In 1984, movie houses sold 63 million seats. Last year, the number fell to 26 million. Fifteen years ago, a smash hit drew 4 million viewers, compared with 1 million now, he said. Normally, the annual output is 30 feature-length films. “This year we won’t reach 10.”

While films such as “Sur,” “The Official Story” and “The Internal Debt” have won great praise, most features barely recover their costs, and international sales rarely make a major contribution. The bankrupt national government is unable to provide the subsidies offered in Europe to film makers, and local television has not co-sponsored projects. Television and video rights are minimal, contributing just 3% to 4% of a film’s revenues, he said.

One potential spinoff benefit for the talented corps of technical artists in Argentina is the fact that American and other foreign producers may choose to take advantage of lower costs and shoot in Argentina, Solanas said. “But we need a profound and serious policy change that makes possible the continuation of Argentine cinema, not just in lending services to foreign film makers.”

While directors of Solanas’ stature can still make films, he noted that “it is very difficult for young, unknown directors to get a start now. In this crisis, nobody will risk helping them.”

Daniel Divinsky, head of Ediciones de la Flor, a small but exclusive publishing house, said that during the initial weeks of the crisis, book sales actually went up as people raced to convert their evaporating cash into goods. But as inflation continued to soar, there was no spare cash for anything but essentials.

‘Policy of Survival’

Now, with printing costs impossible to establish from week to week and no chance of setting realistic prices, “we don’t want to sell that many books,” Divinsky said. “It is more sensible to keep the books and sell them when we know what the price should be. This is a policy of survival.”

“We are not publishing any new books right now, or even reprinting older editions that are sure sellers,” he added. Asked how much his costs have gone up, Divinsky laughed and asked, “Do you mean from yesterday to today?”

Divinsky was detained for four months in 1977, during military rule, for publishing a children’s book that the armed forces deemed subversive. He then went into exile for seven years until democracy returned.

“I would be more afraid if our freedoms were threatened than if the economy were threatened,” he said. “At least there are books of all sorts on the shelves, even if not many people are buying them.”

Fernando Solokowicz, owner of Pagina 12, an attractive, two-year-old newspaper, said that circulation has stayed steady at 70,000. But while the paper was breaking even three months ago, it now runs a 50% deficit. Newsprint that cost 9,000 australs a ton in March now costs 52,000 australs after six increases. The newsstand price of 20 australs, up from 10, now covers just the cost of the paper itself, he said.

Gabriel Senanes, a musician and orchestra director, said some musicians have been without concert dates for months. A number of musical artists have emigrated, and “today, one of the identifying factors of Argentine-ness is exactly the sense of crisis. That is part of our identity.”

Impact on Records

One side effect of the crisis is that mass-produced, low-quality records are vanishing, while better material aimed at more discriminating and wealthier audiences is faring better, he said.

Juan Carlos Zaraik Goulu, a composer and spokesman for the composers’ association, said record sales have fallen by 60% from that of a year ago.

He saw a potential bright side. “I believe that Argentine culture, undergoing all these changes in this deep crisis, can find a way to reach the bottom and recover its identity. If we develop our own solution, we will also rebuild our culture. But if we turn to the outside economically, and there is huge foreign investment, then they will also invade us with their culture as well, which will overwhelm us.”

For now, “neither the working class nor the middle class can buy records. They are buying shoes instead.”