Opera audience in Flanders: using geometric data analysis to explore audience segmentation along aesthetic dimensions

In popular discourse stereotypes about the opera and its audience abound. The prototypical operagoer is the well-dressed businessman in his fifties from the upper middle-class for whom conspicuous leisure is as important as the aesthetic pleasure derived from attendance. Or it is the elderly woman, ostentatiously dressed en robe wearing a stylish fur coat and giving herself to refined chit-chat on the mise-en-scène or the vocal qualities of the prima donna. Question remains whether these obstinate images still hold for the present day opera audienceU+2014and/or whether they have ever been pertinent/applicable. Is opera indeed exclusively the pastime of the well-to-do bourgeoisie, rich in both economic and cultural capital? Or can other, more ascetic-elitist audience segments be traced (Bourdieu, 1979)? Based on a large-scale visitor study in the Flanders Opera in Ghent and Antwerp (Belgium), we focus on the social composition of the contemporary opera audience in Flanders, its attitudes with regard to cultural and economic left-right axes and its aesthetic dispositions. Specific multiple correspondence analysis and Euclidean classification (Le Roux and Rouanet, 2004) are used to explore the audienceU+2019s cultural, economic and aesthetic values/attitudes and to analyze in what way these are linked up with social background characteristics.