Daily Inspiration Quote by Bruce Beresford

Commissioning an opera, Beresford suggests, is the easy part; earning a life for it is the real miracle. The line has the clean, deflating candor of a director who’s spent decades watching ambitious projects collide with the hard physics of audience attention. It’s not anti-art so much as anti-romance: a reminder that institutional prestige and philanthropic money can bring a work into existence, but they can’t make people keep showing up.

The intent is diagnostic. Beresford is pointing at a structural imbalance in the classical pipeline: new operas are born into a system built to endlessly replay a small canon. “Still being commissioned” sounds hopeful until the qualifier lands - “although” - and the optimism collapses into a market reality. The subtext is that gatekeepers often confuse production with impact. A premiere can function as cultural signaling (look, we’re contemporary; look, we’re inclusive; look, we’re investing), while the repertoire slot that would grant repeat performances remains fiercely protected.

His choice of “nothing apart from audience popularity” is deliberately blunt. It strips away the usual safety blankets - critical acclaim, awards, adventurous artistic directors - and implies that opera’s survival isn’t decided in grant applications but in ticket scans and word-of-mouth. Coming from a film director, there’s an extra sting: cinema understands repetition as the engine of cultural memory; opera too often treats it as optional.

It’s a warning to creators and institutions alike: if you want new work to matter, you can’t just stage it. You have to build desire around it.