Scraping the Performance History at the Royal Opera House

As a fan of both open data and the Royal Opera House (ROH), I was excited to find an article promising that the ROH’s data might be opened up. That article was from 2014, though, and the only open ROH data I could actually find was the Royal Opera House Collections Database. Its format is far from friendly — there are no cleaned CSV or even XLSX files — but happily the website’s structure is fairly predictable, so I managed to write a basic scraper to pull out the high-level performance data. Unfortunately, the database only goes up to 2012 (starting from 1946).

The result is this interactive dashboard created in Tableau:

Highlights:

• By 1993 the number of performances (159) was closing in on the earlier 1951 peak of 168.
• 1998 and 1999 were the years the ROH was being rebuilt.
• Matinees grew more popular through the noughties.
• 1968 was the last year the company performed as the Covent Garden Opera Company.
• Tosca was the most performed opera over the period, with 187 outings.
• La bohème was the most popular matinee.
• The Kirov Opera was the third most frequent visiting company, with 33 appearances — plus another four after it became the Mariinsky Theatre.

Here’s the scraper code: