I love the entertainment of opera, and the fact that our company employs thousands of people each year as it plays to hundreds of thousands of people across Australia. But opera, like all great art, matters more profoundly. You see art will do its work whether we like it or not. The arts gene is epidemic. Promiscuously passed from generation to generation, it cannot be extirpated.
Art is rooted in our society.
I m labouring the point, I know, but it is important to recognize that the existence of an opera company, or a dance company, or a gallery or an orchestra is itself a response to a very deep communal ambition , an artistic ambition. The Opera is not somehow grafted on to a community. It develops from a community . It is informed by the enterprise of every choir, every amateur theatrical society or orchestra, in the land. This random, irrepressible activity is how a community expresses its support for the idea of an opera company, how it sustains it, if you like, just as Australia s much lauded cricket team is linked to every amateur cricketer who takes to the field on Saturday afternoon, or to a lusty game of beach cricket down at Albert Park.