For an organisation so full of surprises – one day on funding, another on restricting free speech – Arts Council England remains remarkably consistent on one point: like many people, it just can’t be doing with opera. Or not, anyway, with most of what’s on offer, what with its unlikely heroics and seducers and obsession with “good” singing.
Can you believe, ACE offers in a new report about opera in England (“Let’s Create: Opera and Music Theatre Analysis”), which follows on from its opening assault on opera in 2022, how much of the most frequently staged repertory was written over 100 years ago? By literally dead people?
That some of opera’s most acclaimed productions – when they don’t radically re-imagine older work – are in fact new, or composed in recent years, has not deterred ACE’s authors from assembling a sort of Monteverdi-shaming graph, in which advanced age in a popular opera evidently indicates creative sterility/critical absence of relevance. That opera critics put up with it would be amazing, if they were not, ACE’s authors have also established, excessively long serving “and almost exclusively writing from a classical music perspective”. If they can’t be defunded by ACE, these collaborators can at least be exposed.
Whether this attractively simple ranking by age is something ACE will reserve solely for opera evaluation is something that companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Globe, and other revivers of playwrights even more offensively dead than Verdi, may want urgently to consider. Opera, attended by 4% of the adult population, might be the easiest art form to drive into effective extinction but, as many theatres suddenly discovered in 2022, past success is no protection from Nicholas Serota’s Arts Council.
Despite zero evidence that audiences are averse to revivals or more responsive to newly commissioned work, the authors, Tamsin Cox and Oliver Mantell, emphasise their point with one of several threats featuring in a document intended to help shape its future opera funding. “As a result of its limited engagement with the creation of new work, opera and music theatre may find it harder to make an argument for its continued evolution as a cultural practice.”
That the Labour party appears, mercifully, more broadminded, with Keir Starmer last week talking about being “truly moved” by music and “losing yourself” in art, expressing his love of Beethoven and Bach, and recalling “how the Tories sneered at Angela Rayner for daring to enjoy the opera”, has only underlined the strangeness of a national arts organisation that seems more aligned, opera-wise, with the Tory, or, specifically, Dominic Raab, view of what Rayner ought to enjoy. When he found out that she had attended The Marriage of Figaro, as opposed to a picket line, Raab said, in 2022: “She was at the Glyndebourne music festival sipping champagne, listening to opera. Champagne socialism is back in the Labour party.”
There is a demand for “types of opera production which are luxurious, expensive and traditional” is how the report’s authors dismiss audiences – including the under-30s buying £30 tickets – swinish enough to like places such as Glyndebourne. But Tamsin and Oliver are not made of stone. Unmoved by virtually everything from UK companies, they adored the sound of an “approachable” US opera about the life of Steve Jobs.
If elitism harms opera’s reputation, it hasn’t – though the evidence doesn’t modify ACE’s appetite for reform – eroded public interest in seeing it. Like the Labour leadership, audiences may even have less difficulty than ACE in appreciating a form that simultaneously embraces full-scale productions featuring acclaimed artists, less affluent but ambitious ventures such as the English Touring Opera’s, and more experimental, small-scale, inclusive or community-based work.
Hint for funding applicants: engage, as Stalin also used to recommend, “with the stories of the contemporary nation”; avoid “excellence” and its synonyms. “Terms like excellence,” the ACE authors advise, “are indicative of the way in which opera and music theatre still retains unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued.” “Good”, while permissible, should appear in inverted commas.
Which is only consistent from a report so unconcerned with plausibility and insight. Only in its extreme suspicion of opera as a cultural end in itself could this contribution really be said to stand out.
It does not help, in a critique that dwells on opera’s perceived failure to satisfy ACE prescriptions on public engagement, that the biggest recent setback to opera has been cuts imposed when ACE complied with destructive government requirements.
“There is pessimism,” the report admits, “about the availability of work in the UK, in part related to the results of the Arts Council England NPO funding round in November 2022.” Advice on an opera “ecology”, however constructive, comes unhappily from an organisation that plunged countless artists into insecurity and distress.
As for relevance: where an opera performance no longer exists, it hardly matters whether it would have been revelatory, enigmatic or a lively story about iPhones. In a recent survey, Norwich theatre confirmed sustained demand for opera and regretted that, following ACE’s 50% cut to Glyndebourne’s subsidy, that a company, like Welsh National Opera, was no longer touring to Norwich or anywhere else. Norwich theatre’s chief executive, Stephen Crocker, said: “Our research shows that audiences crave opera and that they want to see it nearby.” Even with opera’s off-putting reputation, 25% of its opera audience, pre-Covid, were “from Arts Council levelling up areas”, yet somehow able to contend with a luxurious export from Glyndebourne.
None of which is to say, with relevance to the fore, that a contemporary opera, written and shouted by non-singers, couldn’t be the perfect way to explore a story about culture chiefs who, falling under the spell of the former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, reduce a once great art form to non-hierarchical efforts about, for instance, culture chiefs who fall under the spell of Nadine Dorries and, atypically for opera, never wake up.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
