The following survey was performed one year ago. It was initially intended for French audiences, although its scope was by no means limited to this particular country. We thought it could be of interest to the readers of OperaGlass to have access to it and to compare it to other sources of statistics, if any. The information seen in 1995 does not seem to render these results obsolete.
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This survey might not fully satisfy American audiences, in terms of data relative to the United States. Hopefully, someone will give it a try. The way to answer these questions would be to obtain all the programs from a season for the greatest number of lyric theaters, from all corners of the world. That would be, even before sorting out the results, quite a considerable task. The traditional approach, in case there are huge amounts of data, is to proceed by sampling.