In a recent U.K.-based study about public perception of opera, 14% claimed to have heard of the opera La Sonata Di Velluto. But there’s a problem: There is no such opera. Nearly 20% of respondents claimed to have heard of the opera The Reverie — another made-up title — a percentage roughly equal to respondents’ familiarity with some real works.

The point of these trick questions is not to make respondents look foolish, but to help researchers pinpoint how much respondents’ enthusiasm for opera might be impacting the data. And there was enthusiasm: “The good news is that people are very positive about their first experiences with opera, both people who’d actually been to an opera and people who watched video clips,” says Seb Wride, director of public polling at Public First, a U.K. qualitative research firm that in 2024 published the study What the U.K. Public Really Thinks About Opera, and Why, commissioned by the Laidlaw Opera Trust.

The What the U.K. Public Really Thinks study is one of a pair of landmark studies about opera published in 2024. The other, commissioned by OPERA America, is Understanding Opera’s New Audiences, in which the research firm Slover Linnet at NORC examines more than 11,000 survey responses by individuals who attended opera in the U.S. between 2020 and 2024 to better understand the well-documented surge in new attendees at American opera companies in recent years. “I read the OPERA America report with the explicit intention of trying to find differences or strong overlaps, so I was genuinely impressed by the overlap on things like price,” says Wride.

New attendees overwhelmingly reported having positive first experiences with opera — about 76% in the Public First study and about 90% in the Slover Linnet study — but that enjoyment did not translate into frequent returns to the opera house for a variety of reasons. “Post-COVID, the big trend is that people are spreading their arts attendance around more,” says Matthew Jenetopulos, a research scientist at Slover Linnet who worked on the report. “They’re not as devoted to just going to the opera or just going to the symphony as they once were, but they’ll go to the opera this month, the theater next month, and a rock show the month after that.”

Both studies also highlight the fact that opera companies are contending with a bevy of assumptions and stereotypes that impact how people interact with the art form. Price emerged as the most commonly cited deterrent to first-time and return attendance, followed by a belief that many people view opera as a “bucket list” item, or something to be experienced once or only occasionally among other entertainment offerings rather than as something to attend regularly.

Opera’s public image, then, is something of a “double-edged sword,” as Wride calls it — its exceptionalism is both part of its draw and part of why neophytes only attend intermittently: “We asked the question, ‘How likely are you to return in the future?,’ and it was something like 90% of people said, ‘Absolutely, yes,’” says Jenetopulos. “But that’s not retention, that’s their willingness to return; the real question is, what would bring them back next season or during the same season?”

Diving into some of the nuances in the two studies’ data and conclusions suggests that shifting that perception may be one of the keys to moving that needle. Additionally, OPERA America is conducting and publishing additional research in the coming months that unpacks this initial report and expands on its findings more deeply.

Priceless art

A nuanced look at the data suggests that many people view opera as something of a cross between entertainment and a cultural experience, as something in between a pop concert and a museum visit. “We wanted to compare opera against other offerings — is it music? is it an art form? is it entertainment? is it a cultural exercise? — so we ended up testing it against everything,” Wride says, noting that the public categorizes opera most closely to the ballet and theatrical performances of Shakespeare.

“The nice way to interpret that would be to say that opera is very unique,” Wride continues. “And the not nice way to put it would be, the opera is competing in too many different fields.”

On the one hand, a majority of respondents in both studies noted that they enjoyed different aspects of the performance like the music or the theatricality or production value, much like they would a movie or Broadway show, which are distinctly for-profit artistic options. But many also said that they engaged with the experience beyond the confines of the opera hall by reading about a work’s backstory and watching or listening to other performances. And the data indicates that this is not enough to bring them back frequently. “You’re up against other cultural experiences and also more entertaining nights out,” Wride says. “It’s kind of a lose-lose situation.”

Opera’s uniqueness is part of what makes it so difficult to price, and perhaps why so many respondents cited ticket prices as a deterrent to returning. It isn’t that they aren’t willing to pay top dollar for tickets to entertainment events like stadium concerts with famous touring singers, it’s that the public’s perception of opera as a “cultural exercise” encourages people to think it should be priced more like a museum visit or educational experience. The Public First report also found that the public believes that opera should receive state support — possibly due to its cultural history — in a way that other performance genres like rock and pop should not. That was true for the U.S., as well: “We see this across the field, from museums to symphonies to theaters that we work with, where people all say the same thing: ‘I can’t come back because it costs too much,’” says Jenetopulos, noting that inflation has also driven up extraneous costs like parking and dinner and drinks, increasing the overall cost of a night on the town.

Anyone familiar with the opera field knows that ticket prices are completely divorced from the cost of producing an opera and that there are nearly always affordable ticket options somewhere in the hall. The two studies suggest a curious paradox, however. Even though respondents cited ticket prices as a barrier, the data suggests that some of those same respondents believe that opera should be expensive, especially those who view opera as a bucket list experience. “We actually had people who didn’t really feel like it made sense to have a cheap opera and that the whole point is to dress up and splash out a bit of money,” Wride says. “Sometimes that translated into worry about whether it would actually be good if it was too cheap. It’s a tough situation.”

Perception and repertoire

Beyond the opera field, recent research into music streaming data reveals that more people are streaming classical music overall. A 2023 report by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra found that orchestral music and opera alike were seeing increased popularity, up 10–25% and 5% respectively, year-over-year. And Apple Music’s top five classical albums feature a mix of names like Chopin and pop-culture figures like Max Richter, who composed the music for the hit show Bridgerton.

This trend mirrors live performance data that confirms that well-known operas are still being performed more frequently than newer, less-familiar titles. OPERA America’s recent Annual Field Report found that the top five operas most produced across North America were Tosca, La traviata, La bohème, The Marriage of Figaro, and Carmen. Combined with the data on attendees that suggests that newcomers strongly prefer familiar work, it can be tempting to think that one solution to retaining audiences might be to increase the programming of top-selling titles. “I’ve heard that, but I think there’s been some mischaracterization of that finding,” says Tanya Treptow, senior research scientist and co-director of Slover Linnet.

Treptow argues that attendees’ increased “omnivorousness,” their drive to divide their attendance among different entertainment and cultural options, extends to the kind of opera they want to consume at an individual company. “I think culturally omnivorous audiences are not going to come back again immediately for something they think will be the same as what they already attended,” she says. “There needs to be variety — we saw in the report an openness to trying out different things.”

The Understanding Opera’s New Audiences report also revealed that many new attendees engage with the music and history of a show before attending a performance. Treptow says that this means there is an opportunity to link different shows through marketing strategies and materials and to “help people connect the dots to take steps beyond what’s familiar.” (Many American opera companies are already enacting this idea to some degree.) She recalls another research project that worked with the Austin Ballet, which found that The Nutcracker was overwhelmingly the biggest draw for new attendees. “If you come to the ballet for The Nutcracker, you may not jump to see something extremely experimental. You might say, ‘What’s similar to The Nutcracker, but different, too?’ And it’s the same for opera.”

There’s additional support for this idea. For the Public First study, Wride says the majority of responses came from people who hadn’t seen an opera. The team showed respondents a variety of video clips of opera, a mix of inherited repertoire and newer works like The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Participants responded positively to both kinds of opera and demonstrated an openness and interest to experiencing all kinds of operatic singing. “But it’s a very fragile interest, right now. It’s an ‘I would like to go once,’” Wride says.

“Of course, it’d be worse if everyone said they didn’t want to go at all,” he continues. “Our takeaway is that there is a route to communicating with these people and turning the opera experience into something that makes them come back again and again."