Final curtains

“I WANT to blow you all. Blow you all. A kiss,” trilled Sarah Joy Miller (pictured, in a pink confection), who played the title role in “Anna Nicole”, a New York City Opera production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The opera depicted the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a Playboy model who, at the age of 26, married a Texan oil billionaire of 89. She went on to become a reality-show diva and tabloid queen. The bawdy comic libretto (she ordered her plastic surgeon to “Supersize me”) gave way in the second half to a dark verismo. The final aria, during which she dies, was as wrenching as the death of Violetta, the consumptive courtesan-heroine of “La Traviata”. It is also a reminder of how she died in real life: with an audience watching.

The curtain went down on “Anna Nicole” on September 28th. Three days later, a metaphorical curtain fell on the New York City Opera. Crippled by financial problems going back at least three decades, the 70-year-old company announced on October 1st that it was shutting down and would file for bankruptcy. Last month, it had warned that unless it could raise $7m by the end of September, Chapter 11 was likely. Pleas for money reached a crescendo when the company took its appeal to Kickstarter, an online platform for crowdfunding. In all, it raised only about $2m, not including $301,000 on Kickstarter.

The New York City Opera was established by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1943 to bring high culture at low prices to ordinary New Yorkers. Tickets are subsidised by donations. But opera is expensive, with its lavish sets and 73-piece orchestras. Those choruses of Hebrew slaves, not being real slaves, demand to be paid. The “People’s Opera” has struggled to break even.

For the whole of the 2008-2009 season it was dark (ie, it staged no shows). To save money, it cut the number of productions. In 2011 it moved out of the expensive Lincoln Centre. All this “did not generate much confidence among donors”, says Marc Scorca of OPERA America, a network of American opera companies. The business model doesn’t seem to be working, observed Michael Bloomberg, New York’s art-loving mayor.

“Anna Nicole” was an attempt to reach a broader audience. (Not everyone likes Schoenberg.) City Opera had a history of reaching out. It used American singers such as Brooklyn-born Beverly Sills. It celebrated new works, especially American ones, and avant-garde music. For decades it was an alternative to a stodgy Metropolitan Opera, but then the Met loosened up and smaller companies started to compete for New Yorkers’ ears.

When Mr Scorca first saw “Anna Nicole” during its London run, he thought it would be perfect for City Opera. But like the real Anna Nicole’s showbiz career, the fun didn’t last long. It ain’t over till the well-proportioned lady sings. Alas, she has.