Opera Thoughts #5
Reflections on working in Germany (2023)
People often ask me about the difference between working in Germany and the UK. There are lots of differences, of course, but the main one is how the performing arts are organised and funded. This post is going to deal with the practical elements of theatre in Germany.
I recently returned to London from Bremerhaven, a small town on the North Sea in Germany where I was directing Massenet’s opera Werther. Bremerhaven is an industrial port town, with around 100,000 inhabitants. To put that in context, that’s the same as Oldham where the playhouse has just been closed down after a hundred years.
Bremerhaven is a regional centre, so it has a large shopping mall, a sizeable tourism industry, and a Stadttheater. The ‘city theatre’ is one of the smallest types of theatre in Germany – it is funded by the city rather than the land, county or federal state, and as such its survival is quite political. The mayor chairs the board, and is ultimately responsible for hiring (and firing) the Intendant (general director) and General Music Director to run the theatre and its orchestra. There’s quite a different feel to working in a Stadttheater as opposed to a Staatstheater, which serves a much larger region and is usually a bigger operation. In any given state in Germany, there is only one Staatstheater, but there can be many Stadttheaters. All the people working at the Stadttheater are employees of the city, and the building is viewed as a municipal resource like the swimming pool or art gallery. In my third week in Bremerhaven, the front page of the local newspaper had a picture of the Intendant with the head of the library – the theatre is a plugged-in, well-used and crucial part of the city fabric.
This means that the public feels a great sense of ownership and pride for their theatre and orchestra. Because there is an ensemble of performers, the public gets to know them quite well and can develop a close connection with the artists as they grow. When an artist who began their career at the small city theatre becomes famous, such as Mirko Roschkowski who returned to Bremerhaven to sing Werther in my production, the public feels a sense of pride that they saw him first, at their local theatre.
Stadttheater Bremerhaven has four ‘Sparten’ or departments: drama, opera/music theatre, ballet and theatre for young audiences, and the orchestra also plays a subscription concert programme. In the UK, opera, ballet and theatre companies in a given city are run by separate managements, and although they may often perform in the same venues, and do the odd collaboration, they are totally independent of one another and many functions are therefore duplicated. The exception is Covent Garden where the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet work under the same roof with a sole CEO, and share an orchestra and production facilities. Most theatres large and small in Germany operate in this way. This is the case in Bremerhaven, but also in Stuttgart, one of the biggest and most important opera, ballet and drama theatres in Germany, each of which has its own artistic director reporting to an overall managing director. This means there can be a much more integrated audience relationship, and costs and resources can be shared. It also means that audiences are more likely to ‘cross over’ into a different artform, especially in a small theatre like Bremerhaven, because it all happens in the same building, with a central box office and a single performance schedule for all the work.
German opera houses are graded on a scale A1-D. This scale reflects the number of positions in the orchestra, and affects many things including how the organisation is funded and the minimum salary level of its employees. An ‘A’ house like Stuttgart normally has at least 99 players in the orchestra. Bremerhaven is a ‘C’ level house with 52 orchestral players which means that it can resource most of the classical repertoire without needing to hire lots of guest players – there are nine first violins on salary. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the famous saxophone part in Werther could be resourced from the house orchestra. In the opera department, there are seven full time singers in the ensemble, and a chorus of twenty. For larger and more complicated works, a semi-amateur extra chorus supplements the house chorus, and guest soloists are engaged on a freelance basis as required.
The theatre performs in three main venues: the main house (capacity 685), the small stage (capacity 120) and the JUB which is a dedicated venue for performances for younger audience (flexible studio space). The theatre has its own scenery and costume workshops on site. The opera department produces six premieres a season. There are no revivals, and this is quite common in theatres with a small ensemble. The theatre plays relatively few pieces on a ‘semi-stagione’ basis, whereby each opera is rehearsed and produced in order and then played in repertoire. A larger theatre like Stuttgart may produce the same number of new operas per season, but fill out the programme with revivals from previous years because they have enough singers on contract to rehearse multiple titles in parallel, and there is additional stage capacity because there is a dedicated playhouse as well as an opera house so there can be more opera performances per year. The music-theatre programme in Bremerhaven always contains a musical and an operetta, alongside a rare or unknown title which is sometimes a piece by a living composer, as well as three more familiar titles. This season the theatre is producing: Verdi’s Macbeth, the musical Hairspray, Weber’s Der Freischütz, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, Massenet’s Werther, and the German premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 opera, Breaking the Waves.
The theatre is supported by public subsidy from the city of Bremerhaven to the tune of circa €35m per annum. Before it was removed from the national portfolio, Oldham Coliseum (which also had its own workshops and produced its own plays and musicals) received £700k from ACE and £260k from local authorities, so a combined public subsidy of just under £1m p.a.
In Bremerhaven, box office and philanthropic/corporate support represents a small percentage of its annual operating income and this is broadly in line with most theatres in Germany. Outside the top international companies, Germany does not have a significant development/philanthropy culture beyond the friends of the theatre who pay a small subscription to be involved and support the work of the house. In Oldham - prior to Covid-19 - ‘earned’ income pretty much matched the subsidy - in 2019 the annual budget of the theatre was just over £2m. Even though Oldham Coliseum didn’t produce opera and ballet, and didn’t support a symphony orchestra, it was a full-time producing theatre company. The pre-Covid budget was around 5% what it is in Bremerhaven.
Germany has a lot of opera houses and a lot of orchestras. Less than an hour away from Bremerhaven is Theater Bremen, a much larger operation serving a Sheffield-size population of 550,000. The main house auditorium seats nearly 900, it has an ‘A’ orchestra and there is a chorus of 40. Although Theater Bremen is a large and important opera house, it is not in the absolute top ‘A1’ league which includes major international companies such as the Bavarian State Opera of Munich and the Semperoper of Dresden. Dresden, for example, has 159 players in its world-famous Staatskapelle orchestra.
Let’s compare this with the UK. The UK has six full-time publicly funded opera companies distributed geographically. Excluding English Touring Opera which operates on the mid-scale, they are all quite large and are at least in some aspects international companies, although by German standards only one – the Royal Opera House – would be considered an ‘A’ house on the basis of orchestra size. Also in receipt of public funding are Birmingham Opera Company, which is a project-based NPO, and Glyndebourne Festival Opera which is subsidised to present a number of performances of its festival productions in the autumn.
Opera North, the fifth largest client of Arts Council England, is based in Leeds (population 750,000) and has 54 players in its orchestra and a chorus of 36. It produces on average around 8 or 9 main-stage productions per season with a mixture of new productions and repertoire revivals, a subscription concert series, a programme of smaller scale produced and received work in its mid-scale venue the Assembly Hall, and there is a large education and engagement department which produces its own programme ranging from workshops to fully staged mid-scale productions. There are 240 staff on salary, and it owns and operates its own premises which house rehearsal and administration facilities as well as the costume workshop. The commercial theatres Opera North performs in are rented and the company is funded to tour its productions to four main venues in the north of England. For most of the year those so-called ‘number 1’ touring venues, including Opera North’s home theatre The Grand Opera House of Leeds, present musicals and other commercial touring productions. Opera North does not have a scenic workshop, so sets are contracted out to commercial set-building firms, or acquired through rental or via co-production.
In addition to opera, Leeds has a leading repertory theatre and a major ballet company which are also significant clients of ACE’s National Portfolio, and there are a number of other smaller NPOs which receive less than £500k per year, such as Phoenix Dance Theatre and Slung Low Theatre Company. Taking figures from the most recent annual returns, we can see that the three big performing arts orgs in Leeds received the following settlements from ACE and Leeds City Council: Opera North - £10.72m / £417k; Northern Ballet - £3.97m / £170k; Leeds Playhouse £1.46 / £588k. This produces a combined public subsidy of £17.3m per annum. Leeds is one of the most important cities in the country, and is seven times larger than Bremerhaven. The profile of these three organisations is very high – they are all national companies with an international reputation. And yet, their combined level of public subsidy is only just over half that of the small city theatre of Bremerhaven.