But what will I do with my Saturday afternoons?
After this season, ChevronTexaco will no longer be sponsoring the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts, and it’s still uncertain whether other funding sources will come through. Which is a great pity. I’ve only recently started listening to the radio broadcasts, but I love being able to hear an entire performance from my living room, complete with descriptions of what the sets look like, intermission commentary, and the sounds of the audience. Especially since I live in a state where the opportunities to see live opera performances are few. (I do have a longer history of exposure to the Met’s TV broadcasts. When I was growing up, my mother and I would sometimes watch "Live from the Met" on PBS: I remember bits and pieces of The Marriage of Figaro and La Traviata, and I remember being allowed to stay up past my usual bedtime to watch all of The Magic Flute. I forget how old I was, but I do recall listening to the Queen of the Night‘s "Der Hölle Rache" in Act 2 and thinking "Whoa! How does she do that?")
Terry Teachout noticed the same article and has some interesting things to say about the future of the radio broadcasts; he thinks the Met should be "narrowcasting" on web-based radio instead. I see his point about how traditional radio may well be becoming an obsolete venue. But not everyone out there has a high-speed connection to the internet. I still use dial-up, and the connection can be terribly slow, so I still get my radio the old-fashioned way. Even if the Met broadcasts were to move to the web, I’d probably have to spring for a cable modem to be able to hear them. And ideally I’ll have a job that pays better than my current one, and live in a city with its own opera company, but right now I don’t.
This is the curse of having what one of my uncles calls "champagne tastes and a beer budget" (a syndrome I’ve had since childhood; these days my budget is closer to Sam Adams than Pabst Blue Ribbon, but it’s still very far from Dom Perignon.) What I like about the Met on the radio is that it’s a beer-budget option — and wouldn’t restricting the beer-budget options provide more ammunition for the people who like to dismiss opera as a snobby elitist art form for the very rich? This is what worries me — this, and what I’ll listen to on Saturdays this time next year.
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