The Oresteia Project:
Expanding Audiences for a Contemporary Opera
Andrew Earle Simpson, composer, and Sarah Brown Ferrario, librettist
Delivered at the College Music Society National Conference,
September 2002 (Kansas City, MO)
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In 458 BC, a trilogy of new Greek tragedies, performed at the annual festival of the god Dionysus, took Athens by storm. The playwright, Aeschylus, received first prize in the competition, the producer (whose name we do not know) won a large bronze trophy that was the ancient equivalent of a best-picture Oscar, and the people of Athens went home talking about the wonderful plays that they knew they would never have the chance to see again. Greek tragedies never received second performances; new dramas were composed for the festivals every year, and even scripts of the old ones were difficult to come by.
But this trilogy was different. It soon became known collectively as the Oresteia, named for the mythological hero Orestes who is the central figure of its second and third plays. And after Aeschylus' death in 456 BC, it was largely the memory of this acknowledged masterpiece that motivated the passage of a special bill in the Athenian democratic assembly: Aeschylus was to become the first playwright in Athenian history whose plays would receive repeat performances.
Repeat performances led to the production and circulation of scripts for the pleasure of readers and collectors, and wide recognition of the Oresteia's quality soon resulted in its use as an educational text in ancient schools. It was probably this popularity which permitted the plays to pass into the manuscript tradition during the Middle Ages, where they survived into the modern era to be read and studied by scholars of ancient Greek.
When, in our turn, we decided to create a series of operas based on the Oresteia, we began to consider where we might generate interest in this project, beyond the obvious awareness bases we knew we could build amongst opera-goers and supporters of new music. For an operatic trilogy based on Greek tragedy, then, the answer seemed obvious. “Classicists,” we said--and burst out laughing. Although the study of Greco-Roman antiquity has always been considered an integral part of a liberal arts education, classicists, as you all know, are not half so numerous at universities as they once were, and many high schools no longer offer the Latin courses that were once a requirement for graduation. Marketing this opera project to such a narrowly defined field of experts sounded like an overestimation of time and effort. But we are here today to tell you why it was not.
We are not marketing experts. Neither of us has ever been to business school or held a full-time job with a nonprofit organization other than a university. We did not learn any of the lessons we are going to share with you today from consultants or textbooks, although some of what we have to say is certainly in line with current arts-marketing strategies. What we want to offer here is essentially a series of steps we took to raise awareness of our work amongst what we have termed a ‘secondary’ audience of classicists, the results these steps have generated, and the wider principles and suggestions we have begun to derive from them. Our basic conviction is that 'secondary' audiences, identifiable populations whose interest profiles would ordinarily not place them at the top of a marketing plan, may be attracted to certain unique aspects of individual performance projects. Further, these projects may be effectively introduced to many types of secondary audiences through their own internal networks for the exchange of information. As the project begins to circulate through these established channels, it gains not only visibility but credibility. It becomes, in effect, a 'legitimate' interest amongst individuals who might otherwise never have known of it.
The key first step is the identification of a project's special features which might have particular appeal for a discernible group outside of the standard anticipated audience base. In our case, our Oresteia trilogy displays a highly significant fidelity to the original tragedies: the operas' libretti are translated into English, especially for this project, directly from the ancient Greek, with every line referenced directly to a line of the Oxford Classical Text of Aeschylus. The music, too, is designed to emphasize and illuminate the dramatic qualities of the original Greek tragedy. The first completed opera in the trilogy, Agamemnon (on which we will be focusing today), is, as the other two operas will be, a number opera. Speeches from the original play have become arias, ancient choral odes have been transferred directly to operatic choruses, dialogue passages have been preserved as recitatives, and the sections which scholars call 'epirrhematic scenes' have been scored, as they were in antiquity, for chorus and soloist. In addition, the plot structure of Aeschylus' tragedy has been left completely intact: the order of events, the characters' entrances and exits, and the original points of respite and closure are all preserved in the opera. Numerous cuts have been made in order to keep the libretto at a practicable length, but even these cuts maintain the original sectional proportions of the ancient text as closely as possible. These features alone set this opera apart from all other operatic versions of the Agamemnon story known to us, and we believed that they might thus be of unusual interest to scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity.
The question then became how to introduce our project into that network of exchanges which relays professional information to classicists. Since we were already in the process of planning a workshop production of Agamemnon at Catholic University, we began to explore opportunities for small supporting grants from classics organizations. As it turned out, the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, the official regional organization for classicists in the DC-New York corridor, offers a Public Program Award for innovative projects which introduce audiences to various aspects of the classical world. Our application for one of these awards was successful and brought in what came to be a significant portion of our workshop’s modest budget. Perhaps even more significantly, however, it began to spread the word about the upcoming production well in advance of the official publicity: the chair of the Department of Greek and Latin at Catholic University emailed us about the opera months before even the campus had been notified that it was to take place. He had learned about the production as the result of our application to the Classical Association. This led us to the formulation of the second recommendation listed on the back of your handout: use grant applications as a form of publicity. Active members of your target secondary audience may be on the selection committees for grants, and their awareness of your project helps to spread the word about it. If you do receive the grants, of course, the potential for your project’s exposure within the secondary audience’s area of interest is increased still further; our opera project received mention in the Classical Association of the Atlantic State’s newsletters, both when it received this grant and when it was supported by a second, larger one from the same fund this year.
The very fact of the workshop production of Agamemnon provided a significant boost in our project’s visibility that we, frankly, had not anticipated. Treating the workshop production as a viable performance and a publicity opportunity increased awareness amongst our primary audience base (opera-goers and new-music supporters) and amongst our secondary audience of classicists as well. The effectiveness of such publicity became evident from the first night to the second night of the workshop production. On the first night, the workshop audience filled roughly 90 percent of the seats in the hall. On the second night, audience size had increased to more than 110 percent of the hall, necessitating that folding chairs be brought to accomodate the overflow house. Discussion at random with audience members revealed that word-of-mouth had indeed helped to attract the second night’s audience, and there were even repeat attendees from the first to the second night.
An additional benefit of the workshop production was that its advertisement in standard theatrical listings allowed it to be caught in another significant 'dragnet' within the wider field of Classics. A leading scholar of modern performances of ancient Greek drama e-mailed us, noting that she had learned about our workshop production via a theatrical listing, and asked for more information about the project. This eminent scholar’s attention was both highly valuable and a confirmation of our project’s interest to classicists. We therefore sent her everything which we possibly could, including a piano-vocal score of Agamemnon, a copy of its libretto, a recording of the workshop production, and a statement of our general artistic goals in creating the opera. As a result, Agamemnon received mention in a paper the scholar delivered at an international conference on Greek drama, held at Oxford University’s Archive for the Performance of Greek and Roman Drama (the proceedings of which are to be published by Oxford University Press). While attending that conference, this scholar hand-delivered her copies of our materials to one of the supervising professors of Oxford’s Archive, a British scholar of ancient drama. In addition to citing the Oresteia project in his own work, this latter professor has deposited our materials in Oxford's Archive for the use of scholars who come there for research, and he has invited us to place a link to our project’s web site on the Archive’s home page. Thus, another important marketing tip emerges from these expressions of scholarly interest: overreact, as professionally as possible, to meaningful interest expressed from within your secondary audience group. By reacting energetically to a request for information, we gained unexpected and significant attention on a much larger scale than that initially envisioned for Agamemnon’s workshop production.
The marketing of our Oresteia project also received an important boost in reaching our secondary audience via particularly fortunate circumstances in the 2001-02 academic year. Both composer and librettist spent that year in residence at The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece. This remarkable situation allowed not only continuing work on the project--the second opera, The Offerings, was composed there--but it allowed us personally to publicize our work to a wide audience of classicists from all over the United States and, indeed, the world. Because the American School functions as the principle base for American classicists conducting research in Greece, and is a residential facility as well, we were able to meet a great number of graduate students and scholars who, upon returning to the United States, would carry news of our project back to their home institutions. While at The American School, we promoted the Oresteia project by giving a joint talk on one of the School’s lecture series, presented a vocal recital, sponsored by the American School, during which we premiered a new song cycle based on music from Agamemnon (the American School even funded the soprano's journey from the US for this recital), and held a special listening session with scores and libretti, open to all interested classicists. The recital itself received both text and photo coverage in the American School of Classical Studies Newsletter, distributed to every classicist in the United States who has ever been a Member of the American School for a summer or longer. This represents excellent publicity in the secondary audience, as practically every Classics Department in the country has at least one faculty member or student who has been a Regular or Associate Member of The American School. Reflection on these highly fortuitous circumstances led us to formulate a more general marketing principle applicable to other situations: take advantage of opportunities to reach a wide cross-section of your secondary audience. Such cross-sections may best be represented by professional conferences or meetings, or by events which bring together a wide variety of individuals who are geographically or otherwise separate.
Another important lesson grew out of that recital at The American School. We both discovered, somewhat to our surprise, that even though classicists can rightly be supposed to have an intrinsic interest in the Oresteia project because of its subject matter, they responded much more enthusiastically to the live performance of Agamemnon’s music. Because of this realization, we formulated what will be an important part of our continuing publicity efforts back home in the Washington, DC, area: short “teaser” performances of music from Agamemnon, given at area schools and Classics departments in advance of its full-stage production. Thus, this tip is very important: be guided by the reactions of your secondary audience, and use that experience in marketing your project. Rather than project what you believe to be most interesting about your project onto your audience, observe what the audience itself responds to, and proceed accordingly.
One further opportunity arose from the occasion of the recital at The American School.
A professor in the Department of Music at the University of Athens has invited the composer to contribute a chapter to a forthcoming book he is editing on four contemporary musical treatments of one of the characters from Agamemnon. This publication is a direct result of that Athens recital, since this professor attended the recital at the composer’s personal invitation.
In addition to using teaser performances to promote Agamemnon, we are currently developing an extensive web site on the entire Oresteia project. This new website, in addition to focusing on opera-goers and musicians, specifically targets the interest of classicists. Contained on the site will be the libretti of the first two operas, the librettist’s commentary on the translation and adaptation of the text, historical and educational information on ancient Greek drama, the aforementioned link to Oxford University’s Archive as well as related Classical sites, images of Agamemnon’s sets and costumes once they become available, and informational materials for employing the Oresteia project in classical studies curricula.
We are also planning future events following Agamemnon’s 2003 premiere, including a possible interdisciplinary university symposium, geared to a wide public audience, which celebrates ancient Greek cultural heritage. The symposium would involve possible contributions from the university’s Greek and Latin, Music, Philosophy, Art, Drama, Law, Architecture, and English/Literature schools and departments. A performance of Agamemnon or The Offerings may be presented as part of the symposium. This project is cited as one example among many future activities in our continuous campaign of promotion for the Oresteia project. Thus, a final point is brought to bear: remember that increased exposure amongst your secondary audience group can lead to many other opportunities, both in terms of professional development and more creative audience-education programs.
All of the above has resulted directly from our experience in presenting and promoting our Oresteia project. Through recognizing the distinct features of our project, and identifying an audience to which those features might appeal, we have pursued the promotion activities detailed above, with satisfactory results. This paper is a case history of our experience only, of course, but it is offered as encouragement for you to seek out the specific and distinctive features of your project, and to promote your work directly to those who may have a special interest in those features. Take advantage of the opportunities relevant to your particular circumstances, and capitalize on those as energetically and as thoroughly as possible.