Time & Perspective Quote by Harrison Birtwistle

The sting in Birtwistle's observation is how casually it exposes a whole arts economy. Theatre, he suggests, lives close to the weather: reactive, quick to pivot, built around short lead times and the expectation that meaning can be assembled in rehearsal and revised on the fly. Opera, by contrast, is portrayed as a slow-moving institution that treats planning as a virtue in itself: committees, commissioning cycles, board politics, star availability, donor calendars. Five years becomes less a practical necessity than a worldview, a belief that legitimacy arrives through scale, delay, and paperwork.

Birtwistle isn’t merely contrasting schedules; he’s diagnosing temperaments. Theatre’s next-week horizon implies risk tolerance and responsiveness, a faith in process and contemporaneity. Opera’s five-year horizon implies capital, infrastructure, and caution - and, quietly, a mechanism for excluding the unruly. If your medium requires an orchestra, a chorus, a unionized stage crew, and a mountain of money, you learn to fear surprise. You also learn to fetishize “the long view” as cultural seriousness, even when it doubles as bureaucratic inertia.

Coming from a modernist composer who spent decades negotiating opera houses, this reads as a knowing complaint from inside the machine. It’s not anti-opera so much as anti-stasis: a nudge that institutions can mistake advance planning for artistic inevitability. The punchline is the phrase “a completely different attitude,” delivered like a shrug - as if the gulf is obvious, and maybe embarrassing.