Artistic Quality in an Opera Company: Toward the Development of a Concept

AGAINST THE BACKGROUND of the debate on quality assurance in nonprofit organizations (Chaffee and Sherr, 1993) and growing economic constraints on nonprofit professional opera companies (Coe, 1994), the issue of measuring artistic performance in opera companies comes to the fore. The management literature has explicitly discussed quality and quality management since the end of the 1980s (Hackman and Wageman, 1995). However, management concepts like total quality management do not set forth a new theoretical approach. Instead, they are based on existing approaches in organization theory, for example, organizational culture and human relations management (Spencer, 1994; Dean and Bowen, 1994). In the field of (performing) arts, scholars have developed different theoretical (for example, Adorno, 1968; Dahlhaus, 1973) and practical (Lesle, 1981) approaches to artistic quality. Others have developed concepts for the measurement of quality for specific types of organizations like health care (Donabedian, 1980), new public management (Jones and Kettl, 2003), and nonprofit studies (Forbes, 1998). Opera companies, as nonprofit organizations, must be held accountable to the public or the agents of the public in some way, so standards for evaluation must be clarified (Schuster, 1997). Nonprofit opera companies receiving most funding from public sources might be held to a standard that places more weight on maintaining a broader audience or preserving a particular repertoire. Nevertheless, even for-profit opera companies, which have a narrower audience base to satisfy and more repertoire flexibility, can benefit from developing a quality concept because it provides a starting point for evaluating their performance.