Unsurprisingly, given its national treasure status and the existential shock of finding that its very survival depended on uprooting itself, discussion of the body blow to opera caused by Arts Council England (ACE) funding cuts has focused on the fate of English National Opera (ENO).
The intention – to force ENO to move from a city that had two opera houses to one that had none – might seem fair enough, in the context of a central government command to shift resources out of the capital. But it backfired badly, by drawing all the attention to one big metropolitan player rather than to the art form it champions. Less headline-hogging cuts to two other leading players, Glyndebourne and the Welsh National Opera, simultaneously forced them to cut back on touring, leaving parts of the country with no opera at all.
So a survey from one of Glyndebourne’s former tour venues offers a useful corrective, and also a timely call to action. As one of the UK’s unsubsidised receiving houses, Norwich theatre relies on the willingness of a loyal audience to buy into a mixed programme in which opera features alongside other forms of theatre. Glyndebourne’s withdrawal from touring cut its opera offering in half, though it still hosts English Touring Opera for eight performances a year.
Since the pandemic, the theatre’s opera audiences have bounced back to 64% compared with 49% for drama. But research among more than 1,000 patrons contradicted this healthy picture. Nearly four in 10 said that opera wasn’t for them, blaming price, inaccessibility and a sense that it was an exclusive art form for the rich. In fact, a quarter of the theatre’s opera audiences came from areas identified as priorities for levelling up, while ticket prices were cheaper than for musicals.
The widespread discrepancy between perception and reality poses a threat to an art form that is not nearly as monolithic as people often assume. ACE itself addressed this by admitting two differently diverse new entrants to its National Portfolio, Pegasus Opera and OperaUpClose, both of which have touring as part of their remits. Part of Norwich theatre’s response is to venture into a coproduction of Georges Bizet’s Carmen next summer, in a classic scaled-down version by Peter Brook.
As one of the world’s most hummable operas, Carmen has long been a gateway for people who think they don’t like opera. It is one of two spectaculars that the commercial impresario Ellen Kent will be taking to Liverpool for one night each in January. But there’s no point in a gateway that leads nowhere. This is sadly the situation in Liverpool, a famously musical city region of 1.6 million people, after it lost its regular visits from both Glyndebourne and Welsh National Opera.
Liverpool will discover next month if its bid to become the new home of English National Opera has been successful. But competition is stiff, with Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Bristol also in the running. It should never have found itself in such an all-or-nothing situation. The wider value of Norwich theatre’s research is to highlight the danger that defunding will create a vicious circle in which opera is increasingly considered to be elitist, so only the elite will go. It would be a tragedy if such a vital and varied art form became the victim of this self-fulfilling prophecy, unable to provide evidence against the myth of its own obsolescence.
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