Hey Timothée Chalamet, Opera Australia thanks you

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I’d like to thank Timothée Chalamet. It’s the least I can do.

In a recent interview, he suggested that opera and ballet are art forms people are trying to “keep alive even though nobody cares about them any more”.

It was quite the achievement. In a single sentence, he managed to do what our marketing team spends weeks trying to achieve: getting the world talking about opera.

Opera, after all, has been pronounced dead so often it should qualify for frequent-flyer points to the underworld. And yet the corpse keeps selling tickets. Across Europe alone, more than 13 million people attend opera each year, filling tens of thousands of performances. Opera Australia has more than a million tickets on sale this year – with many performances already sold out. A curious way for society to show a complete lack of care for an art form.

The deeper misunderstanding, though, is not about numbers. It is about relevance.

Opera survives because it tells uncomfortable truths about human behaviour, and often the parts we would rather not talk about.

An ugly American, a young woman abused. Does the plot of this sublime opera sound familiar?

Take the works in our current season at Sydney Opera House. Madama Butterfly tells the story of a 15-year-old girl, underage by any modern standard, drawn into an arranged marriage before being exploited and abandoned by a visiting naval officer. Hansel and Gretel is essentially a warning to children about the predatory nature of strangers offering sweets. Turandot is a brutal study of power, trauma and the dangerous mechanics of desire. Eugene Onegin explores male pride so fragile it leads to a pointless duel and needless death.

If these plots dropped on Netflix tomorrow, they would be praised as fearless explorations of exploitation, youth suicide, violence, ego and the wreckage human beings leave in each other’s lives.

Later this year, with our friends at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre – another organisation that appears to care about opera – we premiere George Palmer and Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife, a major operatic adaptation of Purcell’s extraordinary retelling of Henry Lawson’s story. It is bold First Nations storytelling confronting colonial violence, survival and the Australian frontier with the heightened emotion only opera can deliver. Hardly the work of an art form clinging nervously to the past.

This week Opera Australia announced the appointment of Amy Lane as director of opera, part of a new generation of creative leaders shaping where the art form goes next. Artists like Lane are redefining how opera looks, whom it speaks to and how boldly it engages with the world around it. With leaders like her stepping forward, the future of opera should impress not only Chalamet, but quite possibly his children and grandchildren.

Which brings me to the more interesting part of this conversation.

Chalamet is just 30 years old and recently declared he would not want to work in opera. That’s perfectly understandable. Operatic performance requires years of specialist training, extraordinary musicianship and a level of discipline that makes many creative pursuits look like a casual hobby.

But we are not suggesting he should sing. We are inviting him to attend. At 30, he qualifies for Opera Australia’s under-35s program, a small conspiracy (or special access) designed to introduce the next generation to opera. His generation. The one increasingly filling our theatres, often arriving curious and leaving converted.

A killer wife and a seedy tryst: Has opera ever been this edgy?

So, to say thank you to Mr Chalamet, when he next finds himself in Australia, there is a standing invitation for him and a mate to join us at the Sydney Opera House, that rather famous little building on the harbour he may have seen in photographs. Come sit in a theatre full of strangers while a story about love, pride, power and regret unfolds on stage with an orchestra beneath it.

He suggested nobody cares about opera. We suspect he might be surprised. That is, of course, if there are any tickets left.

Alex Budd is the chief executive of Opera Australia.

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© The Sydney Morning Herald