Two opera houses, same city, same budget, same size of ensemble. One of them can be described in a single sentence. The other cannot.
With the first, everyone knows immediately what they’d go there for. For the daring stagings nobody else dares to risk. For a Verdi repertoire cultivated like almost nowhere else. For the rediscoveries, the forgotten scores that get to sound one more time. One sentence is enough, and the audience knows whether this is their house.
About the second, nobody knows anything precise. It plays Carmen and La Bohème, adds a baroque evening, a cautious bit of modernism, some operetta for New Year’s Eve. All of it decent. All of it for someone or other. And at the end of the season, no one could say what this house actually stands for. It has a full calendar. It has no strategy.
The House That Fits in One Sentence
Strategy is not the thickest plan. Strategy is the sentence a house can be described with — and that would not be true of another house.
That sounds almost too simple, and yet this is exactly where most fail. Because a house that plays everything has, in truth, decided on nothing. It wants the bel canto devotee as much as the fan of radical stagings, the loyal subscriber as much as the curious first-time visitor, tradition as much as experiment. Everyone is supposed to find something. And so nobody finds a house that feels built for them. A house that plays for everyone plays for no one in particular.
A portfolio is nothing other than a strategy made visible, night after night. It is the place where an intention becomes a fact: this is where the money gets committed, the ensemble contracted, the calendar filled — according to an idea of what this house wants to be. If that idea is missing, the portfolio isn’t a portfolio. It’s a budget that has spread itself around. A strategic portfolio, by contrast, doesn’t merely add up — it compounds: every production strengthens the same profile, and the house grows more unmistakable with every season.
And a strategy has a price. Deciding on a profile means letting part of the possible audience walk away — the part this house was never meant for. That is uncomfortable, and that is exactly why so many dodge it. Better to keep everyone a little than anyone entirely.
Nor is balance a strategy yet. A season can be exemplarily poised between the safe and the daring, the grand and the small, and still point in no direction at all. Balance is a property. Strategy is a direction. The one does not replace the other.
A List That Ought to Be an Argument
There is a fine but decisive difference between a season that is a list and one that is an argument.
The list lines up what gets played. The argument explains why this and not that. Every production on a strategic season plan has to face the same question: does this evening make us more of the house we want to be? Whoever has no answer to that has no reason to play the piece — except that it happened to be lying around.
This is where things get delicate. Where strategy is missing, all proposals suddenly look equally good. The selection then no longer follows an idea but the loudest voice in the room: the star conductor with his passion project, the biggest sponsor with his taste, the department that pushes most persistently. In some portfolios, every department ends up with its favorite project accommodated — neatly, fairly distributed, nobody leaves empty-handed. The result is twelve directions at once and not a single one in which the house would lead. And when someone in the review asks what the house is actually betting on, the room goes quiet.
A strategy is the answer to that silence. It supplies the criterion every proposal has to measure itself against, and it makes the no defensible long before it hurts anyone. Without it, prioritization is just a polite word for the question of who in the room holds the most power.
What does that look like in practice? A house decides: we are the house of the unjustly forgotten. From that one sentence, almost everything else follows on its own. Casting doesn’t look for the biggest name but for the voice that can bring a lost bel canto role back to life. The money flows into dramaturgy and source research instead of the region’s twelfth Bohème. And the audience that comes, comes for exactly that — and stays. One single strategic sentence has just pre-empted a hundred smaller decisions that would otherwise each have had to be fought out on their own. That is the real service a strategy performs: it decides in advance, so that not every evening has to be won all over again.
What a House Believes Is Not in the Playbill
Among the most stubborn self-deceptions is the idea that strategy is what’s written in the mission statement. It isn’t. The true strategy of a house can’t be read off its vision document. It can be read off its season.
A house can proclaim that it stands for the bold new work — and then schedule Tosca, Aida, and La Traviata season after season, because the box office demands it. What does this house really believe in? Not in what it says. In what it plays. Strategy shows itself where resources get committed, not where intentions get printed. These days I read mission statements with the same caution as gushing opening-night reviews — both tend to say more about their author than about the work.
That is the uncomfortable test for every portfolio: not what leadership says about its strategy, but what’s in the calendar and who’s being paid for it. Where the two come apart, the strategy is just a wish. The season plan, on the other hand, embellishes nothing. It is the only honest strategy paper a house owns.
Back to the two houses. Same city, same budget, same ensemble. One of them decided what it exists for, and lost part of the audience over it — the part it was never meant for. The other wanted to keep everyone and lost, in the process, the very bond that makes a house a house: that somebody says, this one is mine.
Playing everything is a strategy too. It’s just that nobody chose it. It settles in by itself when no one finds the courage to finish the sentence that begins with «We are the house that…»
And a house that never finishes that sentence still gets its applause. Polite, correct, a different audience every night. Only nobody comes because of the house. They come because of the piece — and leave the moment another house does it better.