$11 tickets might be the key to saving opera in Philadelphia

Last August, Anthony Roth Costanzo rolled the dice on a novel idea. Faced with weak ticket sales, past debt, and a shaky financial outlook, the Opera Philadelphia general director and president slashed ticket prices: any seat in the house, $11.

In the short term, at least, the gambit was a success. This season is essentially sold out.

Emboldened by the win, the company’s new leader is taking another risk. Opera Philadelphia next season will double its number of performances and grow the budget by nearly 20%.

The boost ups the ante on the company’s future, raising the question of whether the audience size will grow with the increase in performances.

Costanzo obviously hopes so but says: “We just simply don’t know.”

Significantly, Opera Philadelphia’s 2025-26 season — announced Thursday — will deliver only one traditional opera. The season is the first assembled by Costanzo since the renowned countertenor and opera entrepreneur took over last spring, and he says he wanted to make a statement as a “changemaker.”

“We are not doing top-10 operas next season,” Costanzo said. In fact, nothing in the 2025-26 season is even among the top 50 opera titles performed worldwide, according to opera tracker Operabase.

The way he figures it, the barrier to attending has been price, and there was an untapped audience “interested in opera — not in an opera, not in La traviata or La bohème, but in the experience of this thing they’ve heard of called ‘opera.‘”

At $150 per ticket, newbies weren’t going to take a chance, and “shouting from the mountain top that it is valuable just like Taylor Swift and so you should come is not very convincing to a lot of people who aren’t in that inner circle.”

But for $11, they bit. The new program drew national attention, and Costanzo says low-price buyers haven’t had a no-show rate any higher than those for regular-priced tickets.

“We were very concerned it would be higher.”

The fear was that patrons might buy a low-price ticket, but because they had neither a lot of money invested nor a deep connection to the art form, they might do something else that evening if a better offer came along.

(If you’ve noticed hundreds of empty seats at the Academy for a “sold-out” performance, there are two reasons. One is the no-show rate of between 21% and 25%, which a company spokesperson says is the industry standard. The other is that even though the Academy seats 2,743, Opera Philadelphia counts 1,770 as full capacity since that’s the number of seats with views not blocked by a column or in the farthest rows where it’s not possible to read the supertitles. When the orchestra pit is in use, 104 audience seats are removed to make way for it. )

But there are at least a couple of other potential pitfalls.

It’s not yet known how many $11 buyers will come back for a future opera, or if there are enough new $11-curious ticket buyers to keep the pipeline moving. (Actually, the new pricing system gives ticket buyers a choice of prices — from $11 to $300 — and many have chosen to pay more than $11.)

Innovation has long been the ethos at the company, but one of the biggest new ideas in recent years has been axed. Festival O, launched in 2017 as the major artistic statement each year, was placed on hold in 2024. Now, it has been canceled altogether.

Costanzo said the fall festival of several works running in repertory didn’t work financially. “I think the hope was that it would make Philadelphia, for that period, a destination that sold a lot of tickets and brought new donors, and I think it did achieve some of that. But it never got to the place where it made the financial burden of the festival balance.”

Next season, Opera Philadelphia’s 50th, the sole specimen from the established opera canon is Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims (The Journey to Reims). The work might not have huge name recognition — the Metropolitan Opera has never performed it — but it has a tuneful score and thrilling, virtuosic vocal writing for an unusually large number of principal roles.

This production will also feature Olivier Award-winning director Damiano Michieletto, a Rossini specialist who has worked in major European opera houses but never in the U.S. The piece opens the season in the Academy of Music on Sept. 19. Corrado Rovaris conducts.

The company moves to the much smaller Perelman Theater in December for The Seasons, a piece conceived by Costanzo and librettist Sarah Ruhl using Costanzo as singer. The piece “reimagines” Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons in a context of climate change and features set designer Mimi Lien and MIT Media Lab technologist Jack Forman, who — to keep the carbon footprint low — will fashion sets from objects already in the theater, and from soap bubbles.

In February, the company is back in the Academy with the premiere of a piece written by not one composer, but 10.

“I said, ‘OK, what if we made an opera in 10 pieces?’ — like the Surrealists did with the Exquisite Corpse, where they would fold up a piece of paper and one would do the head, one would do the body, one would do the legs.”

The resulting Complications in Sue, with a libretto by Michael R. Jackson, will consist of 10 segments by 10 composers: Andy Akiho, Alistair Coleman, Nathalie Joachim, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Rene Orth, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Kamala Sankaram, Dan Schlosberg, and Errollyn Wallen. The work stars cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond and is conducted by Caren Levine.

Premiering in the Academy in April 2026 is Sleepers Awake by Gregory Spears, inspired by Robert Walser’s reinterpretation of The Sleeping Beauty. The piece has a couple of solo vocal roles, but the big star is the chorus. Rovaris conducts, with Elizabeth Braden leading the Opera Philadelphia Chorus.

The Black Clown, cocreated by Davóne Tines, Michael Schachter, and Zack Winokur with music by Schachter, ends the season in May 2026 in the Miller Theater. With a text based on Langston Hughes’ poem of the same name, the music theater work draws on vaudeville, gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals. Tines sings the title role, joined by 12 other singers.

None of the four contemporary works is opera in the traditional sense — and actually, Costanzo says, neither is the Rossini.

“Il viaggio a Reims isn’t actually an opera. It was written as a pièce d’occasion for the coronation of Charles X [of France, in 1825]. So in reality, everything is an opera in our 25-26 season, but also nothing is an opera.”

The current season featured only three titles with nine performances; Mozart’s Don Giovanni opens April 25. Next season it will be five works and 18 performances, with the annual budget increasing to $13.1 million from the current $11.1 million.

“So we’re doubling the number of performances, but one interesting statistic is that if you amortize the cost per performance, it goes down 33%,” he says.

The $11 tickets resulted in earned revenue going down from 8% of the budget to 4%.

But at the same time, the larger audience has helped to make the case for more philanthropic support. Costanzo says he has raised millions of dollars from donors new to Opera Philadelphia, though he declined to specify an exact amount.

“And in order to grow, that is necessary.”

The company is “an inflection point,” he says, “and I really don’t know whether this season of growth will succeed or not. I think that we’re not out of the woods.”

But to him, the success of the $11 ticket program points to something worth heeding.

“As someone who’s been in opera for 30 years, it gave me faith that this is something people want.”

Subscriptions go on sale Thursday at 10 a.m. Members of a new “Opera Pass” program have access to the “Pick Your Price” presale May 1-14. Single tickets and “Pick Your Price” go on sale to the public May 15.

🌐 operaphila.org, 📞 215-732-8400.