How much do opera stars get paid? Because we know about as much for certain about opera singers" fees as we know about the origins of the Universe, I was fascinated to notice in a corner of the Metropolitan Opera's website the open admission that for "the 2010-2011 season, the top artist fee was $16,000 per performance." It is extremely rare - unprecedented, indeed - for any opera house to come clean on any aspect of a matter which has always been shrouded in a miasma of secretive rumour, with nothing ever confirmed or denied, and negotiations between managements and agents considered super-confidential. There was an attempt made some twenty years ago in Vienna to establish an internationally agreed scale of fees, but this foundered. Broadly speaking, we may surmise that a boom in the 1960s which saw fees rising as high as £50,000 a performance on mainland Europe collapsed in the mid 1990s. The Met's 2010-11 figure of $16,000 - roughly £10,000 - is also likely to represent the mean currently offered by other top houses such as Covent Garden, the Vienna Staatsoper, La Scala, Opéra Bastille, Munich's Bayerische Staatsoper etc. One can safely assume that when every operatic organisation is struggling to balance their books, there won't have been any increase over the last three years, and it should also be emphasised that only a couple of handfuls of big names would be in that £10k bracket: jobbing singers could expect half that. Out of those sums, the singer will have to pay living expenses in a foreign city, 15 or even 20 per cent agent's commission and tax (sometimes reclaimable, sometimes not). No fee is normally paid for rehearsal time (the Met being an exception here). So if, for example, someone like Joyce DiDonato does six performances away from home, she might net £40,000 over a six-week period (including rehearsals). We're certainly not talking banker's bonus levels here, and the figure becomes even less impressive when you consider that to keep in peak vocal condition no opera singer will want to perform more than seventy times a year. None the less, members of that top 20 do make a very good living. In 2009 a divorce case for the high ranking Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, then resident in London, revealed that his annual taxable income in the UK was in the region of £2 million: the bulk of that sum would have been made through one-off concerts, which are far more profitable than opera. These include not only public events in halls, but also easy-peasy turns at corporate events and billionaires" birthday parties - I've often heard of people being offered £50,000 to croon a couple of arias in Abu Dhabi hotels. And sometimes the state can still be persuaded to cough up: one rather shocking story I heard recently concerns a Very Famous Tenor who was booked to appear at a gala birthday concert in an Eastern European country for a fee of 100,000 euros. The Ministry of Culture subsequently decided it simply couldn't afford to meet such a sum, but rather than cancel the star attraction and end up with egg on its face, it made a call to the marginally less cash-strapped Ministry of Health, which siphoned off the necessary money, previously designated for the budget of a hospital. The best agents play all sorts of tricks through which they can squeeze a bit more out of the employers: for instance, premiums for standing in at short notice - something which any singer is always delighted to do, not least as no time need be wasted in unremunerative rehearsal. An oddity is the Bayreuth Festival: it has a unique system of payment, which rigidly matches the fee to the importance of the role rather than the eminence of the singer. Norman Lebrecht's interesting 1996 book When the Music Stops offers some figures in an appendix, but I'm not altogether convinced by their accuracy, and in any case they are now purely historical. Further guesses based on anecdotal evidence: Grange Park and Garsington: top fee about £1,000; Glyndebourne about £3,000 (but you benefit from a long run of performances); Opera North pays less than WNO, which I imagine goes up to £2,500; ENO, probably £3,000 for a few bigger names, but £1,500 for most others; Wexford Festival, peanuts. I'd be fascinated to hear from anyone who could fill in some of the yawning gaps in this arcane jigsaw.