MUSIC : More Than a Museum : As it opens its sixth season, L.A. Music Center Opera walks a tenuous line between Eurocentric traditions and pressures to cater to multiculturalism

The Spanish temptress, who sings in French, is played by an African-American woman whose last role was as a jilted Japanese bride. Her paramour is portrayed by a Mexican-born man. And the countryside in which they dance out their passions is peopled with men and women of an array of complexions and native tongues.

If this sounds like a model of “colorblind casting” in a hip multicultural stage production, you’re half correct. This imaginary ensemble is culturally diverse, all right, but the vehicle is anything but new and trendy. It is a popular warhorse in one of the most traditional forms.

This is business as usual in the world of opera, which has long been a model of onstage integration. Yet in 1991 Los Angeles, where the times are changing faster than Tosca can leap off the precipice, questions about diversity and relevance have begun to reach even this stronghold of Euroculture.

From some vantages, it looks as though opera is the one form that hasn’t had to accommodate the imperatives of multiculturalism. Take another look, though, and opera chieftains are scrambling just as much as their counterparts in other arts to find new ways to keep up with the changing complexion of the United States.

While insiders differ on whether and how much opera is adjusting to the times, nearly all agree that the field is in a unique position.

Unlike theater, performance art and the visual arts--and, to a lesser extent, dance and music--opera companies aren’t rife with programs, labs and staffers meant to cultivate non-Anglo artists. They aren’t worrying over how to fill the “Asian slot” in their season, nor where to get the next Latino or African-American script. Nor do they worry if their output is sufficiently diverse to satisfy the mandates of this or that granting body.

Opera, though, is staring down the road at change, as traditional audiences age and wane and the demographic makeup of the potential audience reconfigures. And the barriers to be toppled are as much those of class as of race.

Things may be going relatively well financially--at least for the L.A. Music Center Opera, which opens its sixth season Thursday with “Madama Butterfly”--but there’s the future to consider. The questions are how much and what kinds of change will be in the picture.

“We don’t just pay lip service to (multiculturalism),” says Music Center Opera General Director Peter Hemmings. “We genuinely believe that unless we pay some regard to where our audience comes from and what they want to see, we will not have audiences in the future. In a city where the bulk of the potential audience will have come from ethnic backgrounds which did not include opera, you’ve got to find ways to be attractive to a different audience.”

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean Hemmings is set to leap aboard the multicultural bandwagon with an all-new roster of hits. “Basically opera is a Western European art form,” he says. “We will always have to remember that there is an element of museum culture in what we do. We are here to present the historical repertoire as well as we can.”

The thorniest question, in fact, may be whether opera should bow to the pressures of multiculturalism, or whether, as yet another culturally specific institution, it’s justified in remaining the province of the European canon.

“I don’t think in a perfect world that opera companies should respond (to the pressures of multiculturalism), if in that perfect world there were other organizations that took up the slack,” says composer Kent Devereaux, a Mellon Fellow at CalArts last year. “But there aren’t (such organizations).

“Opera is the last bastion of high culture, held up as something that doesn’t have to respond. As the constituency changes, though, it will have to respond to survive. How much, I don’t know.”

With decades of “colorblind casting” to its credit, though, the operatic repertoire remains the undeniably Eurocentric province of the old guard.

“Opera has been one of the first forms where casts have been multicultural,” notes Tomas Hernandez, director of the opera-musical theater program of the National Endowment for the Arts. “That doesn’t mean that because opera is colorblind we don’t need to do more or that that’s the absolute answer.”

Although there has been integration in casting, the backstage and administrative rosters of opera companies are no more integrated than those of other major art forms, with the hierarchies still dominated by whites. On the other hand, there are a few high-profile non-white non-singers in the opera universe, such as Steve Curwood, the African-American host of National Public Radio’s “World of Opera.”

There’s a long way to go, though, and the single most powerful spur to change is the priorities of those who give out the money.

“It’s clear that one of our goals is diversity in all levels of the field,” Hernandez says of the NEA’s priorities. “Our program has been one of the first where we specifically put in our guidelines that applications will be reviewed in terms of what kind of multicultural outreach they are doing. That’s always something the panel discusses and evaluates.”

Yet when it comes to diversification, the areas that are discussed most frequently are not staffs but the audiences and the works being presented.

While Music Center Opera, for example, has never done a demographic analysis of its audience, the consensus is that like the opera audiences in general, it has a traditional patron base: white, well-off and aging.

It’s the “aging” that’s the problem. If anything offers opera incentive for cultural diversification, it is the need to appeal to the next generation of opera-goers--a group markedly unlike the current ticket-buying pool.

“Marketing departments found that . . . if the demographic pattern of the last two decades continued, opera would soon be without an audience,” Devereaux wrote in the spring issue of High Performance magazine. “Opera simply had to attract a new audience for the survival of the institution. American opera was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th Century as the rest of the world prepared to enter the 21st.”

“I don’t think anyone can continue to cater to an aging audience,” says Murray Horwitz, director of cultural programming for National Public Radio and a former acting director of opera-musical theater for the NEA. “Certainly in L.A., there’s all kinds of incentives: Anytime you broaden your base, you’re making yourself more essential to the community.”

Hemmings, in fact, is nearly alone in denying that the audience is aging. “No, I don’t think it is,” he says. “The audiences seem to me to be how they were when I started. It’s much the same people going as went 30 years ago.”

“The call for pluralism ultimately redounds to the issue of future audiences,” Hernandez says. “My take on how the art form ought to be responding to the demands of cultural pluralism is in making itself accessible.

“What has happened, partly because of ‘tradition,’ is that we have turned people away. That’s where the field needs to focus in order to address issues of multiculturalism. The charge of elitism is partly due to certain barriers to appreciation of the form. Those barriers need to be looked at.”

If anything can topple these barriers, it ought to be the operas themselves. But while artists and observers point to the wealth of contemporary--and multicultural--work being penned, this work doesn’t necessarily make it to the stage. It certainly doesn’t appear on many of the major stages around the country, which continue to bank quite profitably on a steady diet of “Carmens” and “Madama Butterflys.”

The lures of the old-standby route are obvious. “In hard times, the pressure to play safe is greater, and I’m proud we’ve never had to bow to that pressure,” Hemmings says. “Obviously we know that pieces like ‘Madama Butterfly’ and ‘Carmen’ and ‘Don Giovanni’ will do 90-95% (of capacity) and the difference (in income) between a popular and a non-popular opera could be as much as $200,000. But you have a responsibility to diversify the repertoire and to be catholic in taste in the things that you do.”

Although the Music Center Opera has its conservative aspect, Hemmings also says it is due credit for innovation.

“We started out in (1986) as we meant to go on, with a challenging repertoire,” he says. “What I’ve always wanted is to examine new theatrical ways of doing things, but, at the same time, not antagonize the old-fashioned audience, which, after all, is the bulk of the audience. That’s quite a knife-edge. So far, I like to think we have managed to balance.”

High on the list of projects that Hemmings believes should earn multicultural brownie points for his organization is a commissioned piece due in two years, based on the life of Simon Bolivar, with Placido Domingo set to sing the main role. There are also two other commissions currently in negotiation.

On the other hand, L.A. opera-goers have yet to see, say, Anthony Davis’ 1984 “X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X),” with libretto by Thulani Davis; Anthony Davis and Deborah Atherton’s 1989 “Under the Double Moon,” or Richard Zvonar’s 1981 “Soul Murder.”

Unlike the Minnesota Opera Theater, the Santa Fe Opera, the Houston Grand Opera and the Opera Theater of St. Louis, the Music Center Opera does not produce contemporary works with any regularity.

That’s partly because Hemmings is no great believer in contemporary American work, Peter Sellars’ fashionable concoctions notwithstanding. “The concept of native American operas has not been developed much,” Hemmings says.

Horwitz disagrees. “We are poised at the edge of developing a truly American tradition of opera,” he says. “Nobody knows where that will lead, but if we’re going to have an American opera, it draws from all cultures.”

“The field is very much into multiculturalism in exploring new forms,” says the NEA’s Hernandez. “There is a lot of activity that has moved beyond your traditional Eurocentric works, and beyond rigid distinctions between opera and musical theater. The reason we haven’t heard much about these works is that the most visible (companies) in the field haven’t been involved.”

Devereaux maintains that there are substantial obstacles to the acceptance of new opera and, by extension, to multiculturalism within an opera context.

“Anything that has clearly delineated influences from the vernacular is going to be suspect in the world of opera,” he says. “You’ll see certain (kinds of experimentation) within the broader European context, but you have strong resistance. They have a hard time responding to contemporary American culture, let alone cultures that are non-European.

“If you look at the repertoire, it hasn’t changed much,” Devereaux continues. “1865 was the average (date of composition of works being performed) 60 years ago, and in 1989 it was basically the same, and it’s even gone five years backwards in time in most cases. The time becomes increasingly removed, more a historic artifact.”

Horwitz, however, believes that the situation is changing: “Two myths are starting to bite the dust--that you can’t do a new American opera and that nobody wants a second production because you can’t cash in on the glitz of a world premiere.”

“Inevitably, there will be developments in the art form,” Hernandez says. “I don’t know if (the new works) will ever get to the Met, or that they ought to. Part of cultural diversity is that there would be a wealth that doesn’t necessarily imply a hierarchy, that what happens in Arizona isn’t less important than what happens at the Met.”

Whatever excuses opera decision-makers may offer, they can’t point to financial insecurity. Unlike other performing arts, opera has been enjoying relatively sound financial times. The number of professional companies has tripled in the last 30 years.

“I’ve been working in opera for 35 years, and in that time the number of professional performances of opera in the world has more than doubled, and the following, especially in English-speaking countries, has gone up an extraordinary amount,” Hemmings says. “Opera has become one of the most popular stage art forms.”

Case in point: Hemmings’ operation, for which earned income now covers more than half of the costs and whose subscriptions are up 27% this year alone. The current annual budget is about $15 million.

The Music Center Opera’s single largest source of donations is its board members, who collectively contribute $2 million a year. “You could say the people who are responsible put their money where their mouth is,” Hemmings says.

Besides funding from the board--whose diversity “improves each year,” according to Hemmings, but which is still largely white--the balance after earned income will come, for 1991-92, as follows: 24% from the Music Center unified fund; 5.3% from corporations and foundations; 3.5% from corporate sponsorships and 2.6% from government sources.

“I’m fairly sanguine about our financial prospects,” Hemmings says. “One could say that this is a difficult time, with the economics not being very encouraging, but we’ve ended the last three years in the black and have been able to make enormous reductions in our accumulated deficit.” (The deficit has been decreased from $3 million in 1988 to $1.3 million.)

With this kind of stability, the 5-year-old company has been able to make several stabs at outreach. There is a recruitment program for singers, and Hemmings has been in touch with the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts about encouraging young talent to audition.

Initiatives for the other side of the proscenium include standby-admission programs for students and seniors, open dress rehearsals, children’s performances and previews for county employees. There are also programs that take artists to public schools.

“There’s no limit to how much outreach you can do, and we take on considerably more than we can cope with sometimes,” Hemmings says. “But the fact that our subscriptions have increased so dramatically makes us think that we are getting new people, or at least we are persuading people who only came on a single-ticket basis.”

Still, there’s little denying the class barrier. “To buy a subscription at the top price is about $1,200-1,300 for a couple,” Hemmings says. “Set that against belonging to a golf club or having a boat or taking an international holiday. Now I know these various things are done, on the whole, by people in the upper-income brackets, but not exclusively--$1,200 outgoing on your major hobby is not unreasonable.”

Money, after all, is inseparable from the pricey craft of opera, and there seems to be less money everywhere.

“The city (Cultural Affairs Department) has so far not increased the amount of money we’ve been getting,” Hemmings says. “The NEA has had such a difficult year. The California Arts Council is under attack. So where the arts has failed is to make out a case to government for getting substantial support.”

Hemmings, nonetheless, spends little time bemoaning the lack of government funding. The only place he believes there could be more, he says, is in support of outreach and education, “helping us to build audiences for the future and fill the gap that exists as a result of Proposition 13, which prevented money from being spent on the arts in the schools.”

A touchy subject for those affiliated with such established institutions as the Music Center, though, is the Cultural Affairs Department’s master plan, with its emphasis on nurturing smaller, non-traditional, culturally specific institutions.

Hemmings is politic on this topic. “I believe (Cultural Affairs) understands the value of the major institutions,” he says. “To say nothing of the fact that there is here at the Music Center a complex of three theaters, one of which can only be filled by opera companies and symphonies. So unless you tear it all down and start again, they’ve got to help us.

“Of course I understand the pressures to diversify. I don’t believe that the (master plan) ignores our needs. The trouble is that we are labor intensive and our costs are bound to go up between 6% and 7% each year just in terms of paying the labor. Also, the value of the dollar in recent years has not helped our situation.”

If Hemmings seems to waffle between such complaints and fiscal bravado, that may be because he is feeling his way with a relatively young company in a town that is itself just beginning to get ahold of what it is becoming.

“Los Angeles has grown up,” he says, his fondness for his adopted hometown clearly in evidence. “When I came here there was a latent demand for opera already in existence. The opera has woven itself into the cultural life of the city.”

Such a relationship, Hemmings notes, is actually part and parcel of the tradition of opera. “When opera was first done in Italy in the 16th Century, it was essentially an entertainment for a tiny group,” he says. “In only two centuries, it changed into an enormously popular and populist form.

“It will change again, and I think it’s our job to make sure those changes happen in a responsible way. You don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

The kind of relationship opera forges with the new Los Angeles, however, still remains to be seen. And what happens here may well be a test case for opera companies around the country--poised as they are between the tradition and the increasing demands of a newly constituted population, between the museum and the laboratory.

“I don’t think the function of opera is to showcase historically static forms,” maintains the NEA’s Hernandez. “Part of what they do, like a museum, is to show masterpieces. But I don’t think the field as a whole is that frozen in time and culturally specific, if only because the audience is changing. Art has to take into account what’s happening in society. It has to be responsive and reflective; it’s not existing in some vacuum.”