Snapped up ... Kirov Opera's production of Wagner's Ring Cycle at Wales Millennium Centre
There are some very enthusiastic - and rich - Wagner fans out there. The Kirov Opera's Ring Cycle, which tours to the Wales Millennium Centre in November, sold out in just three hours on Monday. The cheapest tickets were £80 (standing, mind you) and the most expensive (wait for it) £750.
My first thought was: you could have a luxury holiday for that. The second went something like this: stand? Eighteen hours? £80? What madness is this? My third: what about accessibility? Those prices don't look great in an artform so frequently accused of being essentially for toffs.
Well. The £750 seats are in fact "superseats". According to the WMC, "the top proper price is £500". With the superseats, there are extras, such as champagne receptions with the cast (sounds dreadful, but clearly some people want that stuff). £500 is still, obviously, an unimaginable amount for most people, but the price does cover all the operas in the cycle: that's 18 hours of music over four days. So put another way, it costs £28 per hour in the £500 seats, or £4 per hour in the £80 standing slots. Hour for hour, it's not so out of sync with the sort of prices they charge in the West End. Which are often, admittedly, outrageous.
Nor is WMC particularly out of kilter with Ring cycle pricing elsewhere. The best seats at the Metropolitan Opera in New York for the same Kirov production are actually more, at $1,125 (£642 - they aren't doing the champagne reception nonsense). The Royal Danish Theatre's cycle, which starts in April, has tickets ranging from £450 to £190. The Royal Opera's Ring cycle will happen at the end of next year, and they haven't yet fixed their figures, although top price is likely to be around £800, they say.
There's no suggestion yet of how much the Royal Opera's lowest-price seats will cost, however. It would be great if they managed to make some of them genuinely affordable. I saw Siegfried from the upper slips (very high up at the side) very happily, for £15 (a bargain given the length of the opera), and if they managed to have some seats that were £50 or £60 for the whole cycle, and standing rather cheaper - surely that's not too much to ask?
By the way, when booking opens for the Royal Opera cycle, the quicker you buy, the cheaper it will be - the EasyJet model arrives at Covent Garden at last! To be sent advance information about the booking you can register here.
