Re Charlotte Higgins’ article (If we defund opera saying it is for toffs, then only the toffs will go. Where’s the sense in that?, 20 February), opera is not being challenged because it is for toffs, but because it is incredibly expensive per head of audience, as well as being limited in its geographic spread.
The resources that Arts Council England (ACE) controls have been disproportionately directed to limited geographic and cultural expressions. This is ironic given that while some of those resources come from the Treasury, a lot come from lottery revenues. The geographic areas that play the lottery the most get the least ACE money.
Northern Heartlands, a newly appointed ACE national portfolio organisation that works in the most challenged of communities in the rural and postindustrial areas of County Durham, is a beneficiary of ACE’s change of strategy. A change that strives to adjust for the historical anomalies, both of geography and cultural expression.
We are supportive of opera and have co-written and performed it with Opera North and people in our communities. We are not toffs, but we have great experience of making great experiences happen with more reasonable, if limited, resources.
Graham Young
Chair, Northern Heartlands
• Charlotte Higgins decries the fact that cities such as Norwich and Canterbury may miss out on arts funding. But fair funding is not only a matter of geographical spread. She presents no analysis of the demography of operagoers, who I suspect are overwhelmingly white, relatively old and privileged. It is fair for ACE to ask questions about who benefits from public subsidies and to ensure these are used for the good of all sections of society in all regions. There are many other calls on public funds that the vast majority of people would rank as more important than subsidising opera.
John Simpson
Churchill, Somerset
• My dad was an East End boy, a short-back-and-sides barber with no formal schooling after 14, but he loved opera. In the 1950s and 60s he would regularly drive to Sadler’s Wells to see whatever was on, and would often take me with him. When the annual programme arrived, he would mark up anything he hadn’t seen, and go along. Some he didn’t like, some he loved, and he had his favourite singers. Once or twice we went to the Coliseum, if a favourite was performing, but he thought that a bit posh. The opera was easily affordable in those days, and it didn’t occur to him that it was “just for toffs” – it was just something he liked. Not sure he’d still be going if he were alive today.
Jean Austin
Three Bridges, West Sussex
• Charlotte Higgins warns of the prospect of opera becoming something only for toffs. I fondly remember teaching in the 1970s and 80s in a Maidstone secondary modern school that mainly served council estates, and the music department in taking pupils on a British Rail-organised scheme to a London theatre, having a visit backstage followed by a meal before watching opera. Alas, schools are no longer able to give their pupils such a wide and varied education involving vital artistic and emotional experiences to be able to counter the increasing elitism in this country. The situation can only get worse.
Brian Thomas
Marden, Kent
• Charlotte Higgins’ excellent piece caught me between seeing English National Opera’s dazzling Carmen, writing to my MP, Ed Davey, about the abolition of its funding, and a trip the following weekend to see its new Rhinegold. A government that has used British exceptionalism to maintain its popularity is unable to see the value of top-class opera sung in English for ticket prices that are about the same as for a West End musical. Will it see the irony and restore the funding? I doubt it will, so I am making a donation to the ENO and hope that this letter might encourage others to do likewise.
Tom Ashton
Surbiton, London
• Thanks to Charlotte Higgins for her excellent summation of the predicament that funding for opera finds itself in after recent Arts Council England announcements. Opera audiences are only just beginning to return in the numbers seen before the pandemic. They can do with all the help they can get. Strange, therefore, that while the Guardian has published many opera reviews online in the past six months, only three of them have appeared in the print edition – and none in the past three months.
John Boundy
Former head of radio arts, BBC
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