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Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)
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A
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B
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Caitlin Vincent about opera wars, inside the world of opera and the battles for its future. So welcome to the podcast.
- [02:08]
C
Thanks so much, Dave. It's great to be here.
- [02:11]
B
This is a fantastic book and it speaks, you know, to the future of a really important art form. But it also, I think, has lessons way beyond just just opera and indeed Actually, you know, for lots of different cultural forms and arts industry more widely, I'm intrigued as to why you've written the book. One of the things that you do quite early on in the book is you sort of set out both your passion, commitment, your involvement with the art form, but I guess your kind of ambivalence as well. And I was really struck by quite early on you responding to a comment on something you'd written where someone had said, do you even like opera? If you were so kind of, maybe I'd say like critically engaged with it. So, yeah, what sort of motivated you to write the book?
- [03:06]
C
Look, it is a bit of a love hate relationship. And I think that for anyone who has been up close and personal with an industry, either as a practitioner or as a researcher, as an, as an insider of some kind, you know, it's not all glamour, it's not all beauty. There's the good and then there's also the bad. And at a certain point over the years, it becomes very hard to ignore the cracks and the rifts and the dividend. So for me, I approach opera as an insider in that I was a trained professional opera singer. I'm an opera librettist, so I write the text for operas. I work with composers. I ran a small opera company for five years and now I'm a cultural labor scholar. I research the opera industry from an academic standpoint. So I've really been embedded in opera for decades now and I really just can't seem to escape it. So it very much drives what I research and I'm trying unpack the complexity of the industry in this book. That's, I think what compelled me to write it was just to say this is such a complicated field, it has four centuries of baggage. Why is it the way it is? Where is this baggage coming from? What does it actually look like in 2026?
- [04:22]
B
One question that kind of flows quite naturally from that, you know, idea of a kind of complicated field is a complicated art form as well. And one of the things you do quite early on in the book is you try and sketch out like what the kind of key building blocks of an opera. I guess people have maybe a quite cliched view of opera. You know, usually kind of people in costumes.
- [04:46]
C
Horned helmets, let's be honest, David, horned helmets and like a metal breastplate and a wobbly. Right, like someone breaking glass. Sorry, I interrupted you, of course. But you know.
- [04:56]
B
No, no. And done, I guess in quite a. Maybe an old fashioned kind of building or. I guess I see you know, you're over in. In Australia, so. So maybe there's more of the kind of vision of the Sydney Opera House or something like that. But I guess the kind of grand, European, you know, maybe kind of neoclassical palaces is. Is probably the cliche. But obviously, like, there's a whole range of other things going on with the art form, and we've got. Where are we now? Like, at least kind of 100 years or so of what we might think of as kind of modern or maybe more contemporary opera. And I suppose parts of what is going on here is related to the idea of a battle for the art form's future, you know, over what kind of counts, what gets included in the canon, what, you know, what is opera and then what is not. And what I guess are the. Yeah, the kind of building blocks are the kind of key. How would we know an opera if we wanted to kind of spot it in the wild?
- [05:55]
C
Yeah, look, it's a great point, and it's something that I grapple with. And I should say that because opera is so unwieldy, I divide the book into different chapters specifically to pinpoint certain aspects of it, because you cannot wrap your head around it just looking through one lens. So I really approach it from eight different perspectives to try to capture the whole. When it comes down to what opera actually is, basically we have music, we have text. That's the libretto, that's what the singers are actually singing. We have the visual, the acting, the staging. That's the live performance aspect. And these three art forms are essentially smushed together in front of an audience. Now, whether something like a musical by Stephen Sondheim could be counted as an opera, or whether west side Story could be counted as an opera, people really disagree. There's a lot of battlegrounds just about what's opera and what's not opera. But we know from. From the very core of the art form. It is based on a battleground. It's this conflict between these different art forms and this idea that we can somehow take the three of them and put them together and create something that's more than the sum of its parts. That's very much the ideal that has driven opera since the early 1600s. This ideal of an idealized art form, that total work of art that's all of those art forms in combination that is somehow transformed into something more. So it's a really idealized goal. It's a really wonderful goal. And sometimes opera really is transformative, sometimes it's not. But that is something that has Just compelled so many creators over four centuries to just keep going back to it. So back to the very beginning, opera was a courtly entertainment. So it was funded by noblemen, by kings. And from that very beginning, it has always been more expensive than the kind of money that it could bring. And even once it became a commercial art form. So we already have that as part of the baggage that it is already way too expensive. It is not a sustainable business model. It always requires some sort of nobleman or king or just a patron just to keep it going. So just all of these pressure points just at the very core of the art form. So it's really a fascinating thing.
- [08:15]
B
It also, I guess, has got this maybe kind of like, list of, you know, what are the kind of the classics, the canon? And I'm intrigued, really, to get a sense of kind of what counts there. Who are the sort of, like, key kind of composers, writers, what are the key operas, and maybe actually kind of where there are debates about, you know, what should be included and what shouldn't.
- [08:42]
C
Yeah, I think so. There's often this idea that opera is what's called a museum repertoire. You know, it's just a heritage art form. It's only old works. But that's actually a fairly recent idea. When you're looking at the longer lineage of opera, that's only the past, let's say, 125 years or so, that the art form has really been orbiting around a very small number of greatest hits. These greatest hits are from the 18th century, the 19th century, and they're by master composers and librettists that kind of anyone would probably be familiar with their names, like Mozart, maybe Puccini, Richard Wagner. These are kind of the heavy hitters. And then we have very particularly famous works that you will often hear in a television commercial or in a movie, like Carmen or La Boheme or Madame Butterfly, the Magic Flute. So it's roughly, you know, 10 to 20 really popular works that are done over and over and over again. But again, that's only been in the past, you know, century and 25 years or so. Before that, opera was very much defined by novelty. It was all new works. They were constantly being produced, constantly being staged and then thrown out and then being written again. So there are a lot of reasons why the canon formed. And that's like many other art forms where you sort of start to crystallize around this particular group of seemingly greatest masterworks, works, often at the expense of the new. But with opera, that's really one of the challenges that the field faces in 2026 because of this heritage. These really historical works that are the products of their time, they are very important as artifacts of that time and they have artistic value, but they have certain complications because they were written by, you know, white European men in 1850 or whatever it is. So that kind of baggage and what a modern day opera company is supposed to do with a work that's 200 years old and has 200 year old views of things like race and gender.
- [10:51]
B
Yeah, I mean that kind of really comes through in the next couple of chapters in the book. Actually one, you know, you mentioned that kind of sense of like some operas being included, some being thrown out. Well, this seems to extend to like the actual score of the opera as well. A bit like debates over Shakespeare or Joyce looking for folio or first edition, stuff like that. And then there's this kind of added layer of debate and struggle over what's the appropriate way of staging these scores as well. And I suppose maybe I'd bring these two together into one question, which is why is there so much kind of interest or focus on somehow being kind of faithful to originals? And why is there so much struggle over what is, you know, kind of included or not included both in scores and on stages as well?
- [11:49]
C
So with the score, you know, around let's 1900, a little bit earlier than that, or more like 1850 or so, there was a rise of the publisher, the music publisher, and suddenly for the first time these scores were actually being printed and there was an official version of these scores. Before then it was, you know, sort of chicken scratch on manuscript paper and it was floating around Italy or wherever. But once it became an official published version, then it became a lot easier to say this is the correct version and that version is not. So obviously this is good for the composer, this is good for the librettist, good for the publisher. But it does mean that you're essentially taking a living, dynamic, performance based art form and saying it is frozen. This, it has to be preserved in this way. And no matter what, you're going to have fireworks because a printed score does not, does not translate to a live stage. There's, there's no way to actually translate it exactly as it's written. Right. So this is where we start to get this tension. So, you know, this composer wants the singer to do this here. Well, what does that actually look like? And what does that look like 150 years later when you have a stage director trying to interpret what's written in that score? So this Idea of fidelity, fidelity to that musical score is something that really drives one of the key battlegrounds that I talk about, which is between the really traditional and traditionalist perspective of opera and the more progressive. The traditionalist view is that there is one right way to stage an opera like Carmen, and it should be exactly as it was, published in one official score of Carmen. And anything else is wrong. This gets really complicated. And I really kind of pull apart this argument in the book to say, well, there isn't just one official version of that score, and we don't really know what this guy wanted because he died before it got going, this composer. But this idea of staging is really tricky because that brings in new creative voices. Right. When you're talking about a published score that appears to be preserved in time, it's notated. It's. You know, those are the intentions of the original composer and the librettist. And then suddenly you're bringing in the stage director who has all these different ideas about what the opera could mean and, you know, how an audience should interpret it. And that can be really confronting for a lot of traditional audiences.
- [14:14]
B
But it sort of goes the other way as well, doesn't it, that some of the elements that might have been quite of their time now modern audiences are pretty sort of uncomfortable with. And you dive quite a lot into debates over, I guess, kind of like diversity on stage, some of which is to do with outdated tropes or fairly kind of cliched representations, but also some of which is to do with casting as well. And I guess again, you know, bringing this into a question for you, it made me think of this issue of, well, why does diversity opera matter, both in terms of things like staging, but also in terms of casting?
- [15:01]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. And some people would say that it doesn't matter, right. That you should do these operas as they were meant to be done, whatever that means. So one issue, as you say, is that within these musical scores, they're the product of their time. So they have a lot of problematic tropes, especially when we're looking at kind of ethnic exoticism, which was really popular when a lot of those really prolific composers were writing opera. But then we have the. The staging tradition, and that's how these operas were traditionally staged at their premiere performance. And then in the decades since when they were being done year after year after year as part of the canon. So some of those staging traditions are things like, you know, certain kinds of costumes for certain kinds of characters. For Carmen, she's often dressed in red, for example, or with big hoop earrings. But when we have those operas that are set in what were for Europeans, far off, distant lands, then we get to more problematic practices like yellowface and blackface, where performers are put into makeup and costumes and directed to behave on stage in a way that creates the impression that they are not white, that they are a different ethnicity than they are. And this can be really jarring for many modern day audiences because we do not have yellow face and blackface in a really explicit way in pretty much any other art form these days. It's only an opera where it is still very much common. If you see Madame Butterfly, you are often going to be seeing a former variation of yellow face. If you're seeing something like Aida, which is about, you know, an Ethiopian princess, you will often in some companies see a performer who has her skin darkened. So what do you do with that? Right, this is, this is that tension. And I think why does it matter? Well, opera has been struggling for audiences for a long time. It struggles for relevance. It's really having to try to make the case that it deserves to survive alongside, you know, albums by Taylor Swift and Netflix and all of these other forms of entertainment that seem to be a lot more relevant and reflective of our, of our modern day society. So how can you actually, you know, make the choice to stage and operate in a historical traditional way, even though you know that that's going to alienate a significant portion of your, your audience, particularly younger opera goers who have grown up in a very different landscape when it comes to those kinds of issues.
- [17:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, that question of alienation both, I guess, of potential new audiences and then maybe more, whether we call them traditional or older or current audiences, I think is one of the things that runs throughout the book. And you know, it's not easy being an opera performer director. It's not easy running an opera company, as you know. You yourself comment in the book. Part of this though is also it's quite difficult, I think, having a sustainable career even if you didn't have all of these quite big, I guess, sort of cultural demands related to the art form on you as well. And the middle part of the book kind of thinks through this both in terms of sustainability of careers and companies, but also actually in terms of some of the, I guess it's a cliche to call it the kind of like dark side of the, of opera careers. We've sort of touched on things like casting, but obviously in the chapter about casting, there's A lot about whether people look right and you know, lots of things around, like particularly women performers, things like weight and looks. But also there's, I don't know whether this is the appropriate term, but I got a sense that there's quite a lot of quite abusive workplace behavior that is kind of allowed to go on under the heading of this person, you know, this director is a genius that, you know, kind of casting executive has always had hits and they should be allowed to do whatever they want. And rather than have you, I guess, describe the problem I'm interested in, in the analysis, are there ways that people are kind of pushing back, kind of changing some of these problem workplace relationships?
- [19:34]
C
It's a tricky thing because, you know, the old joke is that artists are the original gig workers, right? They were, they were gig workers before it was cool to be a gig worker. And opera singers are absolutely gig workers. They are independent contractors. They do not have an HR department that's protecting them. They are being hired based on their reputation, based on the reviews from the last show and based on their network work. Right. Just like we know from, and, and you know, from a lot of your work on, on employment in the arts. Right. So it's very difficult to, to push back in any meaningful way when you are in an abusive rehearsal room, for example, where there's a stage director who is verbally abusing you or, or, or worse. Right? So, so what can you do? I mean, I think at a certain point if you rest, if you achieve a level of prominence as an opera singer, then you're able to go to the company and say, I'm not going to stand for this. You know, I'm such and such, I'm a diva, right? I'm, I'm the star singer. But it's the really vulnerable, often the younger singers that junior roles where they are really, really susceptible to exploitation in terms of the kind of pay that they're receiving, but also the, about the amount of abuse that they are, are, you know, might be facing, but also are going to be willing to take because they need to make friends with that conductor because they need to get hired for the next gig. So it's, it's. And in the book, I don't really have a solution and I cross all of these battlegrounds. I try to just lay out both sides of the argument and obviously I have opinions, but I just try to say, okay, let's just lay it all out here and we can sort of see where the pressure points are and what could maybe be better for Me, I think that, you know, opera companies do have responsibility to protect the workers in their employ, but part of that also means acknowledging that artists are also workers, that opera is not just an art form, it is also a site of employment. And these singers who are also artists deserve safe working conditions and a certain level of expectation for how they're going to be treated. Like, you know, that goes back into these, all these questions of, well, they're artists, right. They're singing because they love it. Right. They're not really workers. It really sort of opens a whole can of worms when it comes to working conditions and artists.
- [21:56]
B
I mean, you've sort of lived some of this yourself in a variety of different roles. And it's not just a question of kind of the importance of artists having recognition of their employment and kind of worker status, but it's also something that companies struggle with as well. And you've talked about the importance of kind of funding, whether it's, you know, state funding or patrons. And I was intrigued by, I guess, kind of your own experience of struggling with this stuff, both in terms of trying to have, I guess, kind of, you know, decent working conditions, but also trying to produce new work as well. And this comes together in Figaro Project, which was your company. And I'm intrigued as to both, I suppose, kind of the story of that company, but also what it tells us about whether opera companies can actually be kind of sustainable over the, if not short term, but maybe the kind of medium and long term.
- [23:05]
C
Yeah, I mean, it really is a trickle down effect. Right. Like the reason why working conditions are so challenging for the singers is because the companies have no money. They, and they, they're trying to save wherever they can. And so that means they're going to, they're going to cut pay or do what they need to do. The figure project was never a sustainable business. We made no money. I never got paid for any of it. Right. So. But the story behind it, basically, I did my master's in voice at Peabody Conservatory, which is a high level conservatory in Baltimore, and I graduated right in the middle of the global recession. And the local, the big local opera company had just declared bankruptcy. And that was my plan. I was, I was going to get a contract with them and then I was going to work my way up. And then it just vanished and amongst many other opera companies that folded during that time. And so I was just left with this, this situation where I'm thinking, I'm not, I'm not going to be singing at the Met next week. I need to build up my resume. I need to get performance experience. How can I do that? There are no companies hiring. Everyone is scrambling. It's a terrible time. So I just decided to put on a show with my friends. That was really the start of the company. I said, well, let's just do a production of Mozart's the Marriage of Figaro so we can all get some performance experience, we can learn this opera and you know, and eventually we'll be able to just do what we're supposed to be doing. We'll get some jobs with companies. Right. So of course it snowballed. And so what started off as this little concert production ended up, you know, we got nonprofit status, we had a website. I was suddenly the artistic Director, just a 24 year old with absolutely no business experience. And I just basically was programming the kind of stuff that I wanted to sing and I wanted to sing with my friends. And we formed a little troupe where we, we performed and we did mainstage shows. And part of that was I started doing contemporary opera as well. I knew a lot of composers from my time at the conservatory and I said, oh, now it's our second year, what can we do? I know, let's just do three brand new 45 minute operas. And so we just did that because I didn't realize that that wasn't something that you just did with no money. So it was, I mean, it was five years and at the end, you know, it really was just that there was no money. And I couldn't keep asking people to work for free. I couldn't keep myself working for free, doing all the admin behind the scenes with some help. And so we were just at that point where it was sort of either we commit to this and we're going to build this into an opera company, or we need to let it go. And so I chose to let it go. And it was the right time. But in the chapter that you're talking about, I talk about the rise and the fall of the figura project and what it all meant to us and what it meant to me. But it's difficult. I. It's hard to find any example of, of a opera company that's actually sustainable in a traditional business sense. Right? Because there's this idea that you are producing a product, the product is being bought by consumers and you are earning revenue. Or that's like the basics of business. This is, this is not happening in opera because you can never earn enough revenue from selling tickets to actually cover the costs of putting on the performance because it's so expensive. So where you do see some companies having a bit of an easier time is it's the very small ones because they're nimble. They're not having to pay for a hundred instrumentalists in the orchestra or sets for five acts or any of that. I mean, and they don't have a venue that seats 3,000 people that they need to sell tickets too.
- [26:40]
B
Yeah. And I guess one of the things that comes through by the sort of time you're thinking about sustainability of companies and careers is this tension between parts of the audience who are like operas in a big venue, five acts, fidelity to a particular version of score and scening and then companies who are like. But that's really expensive. Yeah, can't afford to do that. And I'm sort of wondering, because it comes through, you know, both in the title of the book and in the book's chapters, is there a way of kind of mediating between those? I suppose they're not sides really, are they? Because everybody involved, you know, loves the art form and is a fan of some kind. But is there a way that that model for the art form can be made sustainable? Is it just a matter of, you know, states, patrons just need to give more money or other ways of kind of, I suppose, nudging an audience to a different kind of consumption?
- [27:52]
C
It's a tricky thing. I think when you're looking at Europe, this is sort of the, the ideal. This is what companies in the US are looking, looking at longingly. A company in, in Germany will get so much state funding, you know, we're talking 70% of their annual budget or in some cases even far higher. So they're able to be less risk averse when it comes to what they're programming, how much they're programming and what the audience can expect to see. This is why you often see really often outrageous stagings in Germany and Austria. Because they have that state support, they had that cushion. So it's not about making the donors happy or ensuring that there's a really faithful production of Carmen that's going to keep everyone happy and they're going to buy tickets for when you go to places like the states, Australia, even the UK to a lesser extent, the funding drops way down from the government and that means companies have to be more risk averse. So the bigger the company, often the more conservative they're going to be because they have so many more tickets that they need to spend cell. So there is a little bit of a correlation with that, but I I would say that, you know, you said it's not two, it's not two different sides. But I think that actually is one of the challenges in the field is that it is thought to be two sides. That there is sort of, there's the heritage, there's the canon there, there's the big grand opera. What people think of with opera, the horned helmets and these five hour long operas there, that's one side, and then the other side is maybe contemporary opera or less familiar works, maybe they're shorter, maybe they're 90 minutes, maybe they're a bit more experimental. And for many in the first side, you know, like stalwart opera lovers, they want nothing to do with the contemporary opera or, or the more experimental opera on the other side, and often vice versa. So there is a little bit of a hierarchy often, especially when it comes to patrons in terms of what they're going to be supporting.
- [29:52]
B
I mean, in terms of that kind of hierarchy or that sense of what people want to support and what people don't. I mean, I was really struck by the final closing sections of the book where you stake out this idea that opera maybe has a fear of the new, which I was really intrigued by. And I mean, you've kind of talked about this already in terms of that comparison between different funding models in Europe and elsewhere. But does it really have a fear of the new? Are companies sort of really kind of keen to be doing different things, but kind of worried about audiences? Would audiences be kind of really keen on new stagings, new interpretations, but companies just aren't kind of providing things for them?
- [30:48]
C
It's a bit the catch 22, Dave. I mean, I think, and part of it goes back to the canon, right? We're having Carmen and Laboem and these, these real. Again, these are beautiful works. I'm not saying that we should cancel the canon. There's certainly a place for that history. But when we're seeing those 10 works over and over again every year, the audience does become so familiar with them that it's a little bit like, you know, go into your favorite restaurant where you know everything on the menu and you always get the same thing, right? So if that's the choice I could see, I could get my favorite dish from this restaurant or I could try something new that I've never heard of. There are no reviews of it. You know, of course people are going to go to the, the old favorite, right? Like there's that, there's that comfort and in many cases it's a very deep seated Comfort, often because, you know, a grandparent took them to see that opera when they were kids or that was the first opera they ever saw. You know, it's a very personal experience, experience opera. But so there is this challenge where even if companies want to program new works, if they are not preparing their audience, if they are not using their marketing and their promotion to persuade the audience that this is important, to help them understand why we can't just forever circle around the same 10 works without the art form essentially dying. Right. You know, that is their responsibility. They are the advocate for the work. So something I talk about a bit in the chapters, I spoke to a number of composers and librettists of new works, and they mentioned the sense of often feeling, you know, pushed to the side, you know, that it's almost as if the. The opera company is apologizing for their work and sort of saying, oh, you know, why don't you just try this experimental one? And then. And then we promise we'll give you La Boheme, we'll give you Carmen. And they're very aware of that sense. You know, there's a reason why when you look at company programming, you often see, you know, out of a list of five operas, four of them were written 150 years ago, and one of them is a new one. Right. And ideally it would be reversed. Right. Or it would be more evenly balanced. But I do think it's tricky because companies are not in a secure position. So in order to take that risk and say, okay, we are going to make sure that within the next five years, our audience understands why new work is important, and we are going to make sure that they are coming to attend those works. You know, if they don't have the financial stability to do that, then of course they're going to continue to retreat to the canon because they're just trying to keep the lights on. They're trying to keep the company going and to keep the art form alive as best they can. I mean, it really is a challenging. A challenging thing. But obviously I'm a librettist, so I am, of course, a really strong advocate for new work. But I also think it's important to. To tell people, and I try to express this in the book, that there is a stigma about opera. You know, horned helmets, right. Wobbly sound. But there's an even worse stigma around new opera, that it is going to hurt your ears, that it's going to be like loud noises and cacophony and you're going to get stuck in your seat for three hours and not being able to escape. Some new opera was like that, you know, 60 years ago. Some of it is now, but not most of it. I mean, most of it is accessible.
- [34:08]
B
It's.
- [34:08]
C
It's a. They're telling a story in an interesting way. They're combining theater and text and music. So why wouldn't we want to invest in that?
- [34:18]
B
I mean, that's a great kind of question to. To finish with, really. And one of the things that the book does, and again, you've sort of touched on this, is try and present the paradoxes of keeping this art form preserved, but making it sustainable, extending the art form, but at the same time trying to make sure that there's a kind of reverence for what makes the art form unique and special and different. And I'm wondering, in terms of your own work, are you kind of part of that? You mentioned your work as librettist, but also you've written this book that crosses both your academic work and then tries to engage a more kind of general readership. What are you thinking of in terms of maybe more work on opera? Are you working on, you know, like, literally more opera yourself? Or are you maybe thinking about applying some of these insights to other areas of. Of cultural industries? Because many of the things we've been talking about are true of visual arts, of, you know, particular kinds of music. They're certainly true of things like getting people to go and see a film in a cinema.
- [35:39]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [35:41]
B
You know. Yeah. Has the similar kind of struggles, if a lack of expense. So, yeah. What are you working on now and next?
- [35:51]
C
So I'm. I'm. I'm always working on an opera or song cycles or monodrama, you know, opera for one person. I'm always. I always have a couple of projects that are on the go alongside my academic work, just because I find it's a really important palate cleanser for me and it's a creative outlet. And I think that if I were only writing dry academic papers all the time, I would just. Just I would not enjoy it. So I have a comedy that I'm working on right now which is really fun. I just finished this piece for this massive orchestra and a bunch of soloists and a bunch of choruses that are just. It's going to be incredibly loud and awesome and beautiful. So that's on the creative side. On the more academic side, I'm currently working on digging into some of the stuff that I started explaining, exploring in opera wars, around career paths, but looking specifically at stage directors. And conductors. So it's. They're not careers that I talk about at great length in the book. I more focus on the opera singer pathway, but I was just really intrigued about how people get into it. I mean, you know, you're a stage director, but you're, you're directing opera. I mean, talk about a niche career path that requires such nuanced skills. Like, how do you even learn how to do that? What. The path. So I'm really working on that right now is sort of mapping out the pathway that a lot of really prominent directors and conductors working opera have taken also, because that aligns to some of the previous work that I've done in my research looking at who's actually being hired by companies. So around gender inequality and representation and diversity, who's actually being hired. So we know who's being hired, and it's a very certain kind of cohort, certain kind of demographic that we also see in many other fields of the arts, you know, predominantly white men. But, you know, why is that? And what is it about the career pathway that can make it challenging to make it as a director and conductor? So that's the current project. There's another couple years on that particular grant. It's a funded project through Australia. So that's exciting. But I think, as you say, the, the lessons and the challenges and the pressure points in opera are certainly aligning to the pressure points we're seeing elsewhere, not just in other heritage art forms like classical music and in ballet, but theater and film and all of that. I mean, it's there, there are these main, you know, these huge challenges right now, and especially something I don't even get into in the book are things like AI and. And not to mention just like the lack of the audience, because why would you go when you can just sit on the couch and watch Netflix or scroll through your phone on all those Instagram AI videos. Right? So. But yes, I think I do love opera. I love, hate opera. So I think that I do keep coming back to it, but I certainly like flirting with other art forms as well.