Opera Thoughts #6

Salvation comes with a hefty price-tag

ENO has been saved – whatever that means. A joint statement by ENO and the Arts Council this week announced that ENO will be funded directly by ACE (but not as an NPO) to the tune of £12m per annum, which is £600k less than they received when they were in the portfolio – around a 5% cut. This compares favourably with the cuts imposed on ROH (12%), WNO (33%) and Glyndebourne (50%), but from this sum ENO must not only present a regular season in London, but also make concrete plans to reformulate the business so that before the end of the funding period (2024-26), it has relocated. It should present its work in its new home-town as well as at the Coliseum, which it will continue to operate on a commercial basis. This is no small task and will almost certainly involve a massive programme of redundancy and relocation. It is also much more expensive than mounting its productions in one venue as it currently does. On the positive side, there is the possibility for a real and meaningful presence in ENO’s new home city. The shortlisted cities are Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham. My money’s on Liverpool where ENO recently performed as part of the Eurovision celebrations, and which currently receives no national opera, since WNO was forced to cut the city from their tour after their subsidy was slashed. Birmingham has its own opera company, and, as well as Bristol, is still visited by the WNO tour. Nottingham and Manchester (or, at least, Salford) are regular stops on the Opera North tour.

Of course in one sense this is very good news, and an enormous relief. But the decision to cut ENO and, some would say - inevitable - backtrack, merely served to reinforce the perception of opera as out of touch and élitist. The twitter commentariat regularly elide opera with ‘Tory’ – they interpret the salvation of ENO as backchannel high-level politicking between influential board members, the higher echelons of ACE, and at DCMS ministerial level. If there’s a magic money tree for ENO outside the NPO, where is the rescue package for that other Coliseum, in Oldham? When meagre public funding for culture is a Hunger Games style competition which pits artist against artist and art-form against art-form, it’s difficult to celebrate ENO’s rescue if your company or local theatre has been closed without reprieve. Everyone is fighting over an ever-diminishing pot of money.

Three things were crystal clear from the NPO announcement in November:

First, that the art-form of opera has been de-prioritised – opera funding as a whole has been reduced by £17.5m per annum. This takes into account the additional funding for ENO.

Secondly, funding is being driven out of London in all art-forms, including opera. ENO was not the only high-profile cut – the Donmar Warehouse, Hampstead Theatre and the Gate were all removed from the portfolio.

Thirdly, there is a strongly stated desire to move away from what the ACE bigwigs unhelpfully call ‘grand opera’ towards smaller-scale productions, and site-specific immersive performances - ACE (or the government) dictating what they think opera should be, and where it should be performed. The ‘winners’ of the NPO opera funding round (and I say ‘winners’ cautiously, because it is a pyrrhic victory won at the expense of other opera companies) were English Touring Opera which creates mid-scale touring productions of wide repertoire and has committed to relocating out of London, and Birmingham Opera Company which creates large-scale, site-specific, immersive participatory opera. Both ETO and BOC were given funding uplifts. New to the Portfolio is Opera Up Close, which produces small-scale touring opera and has also relocated outside London. It is true to say that these three organisations have certainly earned an increase in public investment because of their great work, but equally true to say that it is devastating that it has to come at the expense of other opera companies.

What can we conclude from this? That ACE sees the ETO and BOC models as the future of opera in the UK, and is less keen to support conventional opera, i.e. works performed at the scale intended by their authors, in large theatres and opera houses. Does this mean the end of ‘grand’ opera in the UK? Certainly not, because there is a long-established and thriving private opera scene which operates alongside the subsidised companies in a summer festival format, the so-called ‘country-house opera’ companies, at a very high standard. It is not inconceivable that we might see some of these festivals expanding their seasons beyond summer in order to fill a gap in provision (the example of Chichester Festival Theatre is worth considering). Indeed, this is essentially how Glyndebourne is now, with a reduced NPO grant, presenting its tour - a limited number of autumn performances of its festival productions in its own theatre at subsidised prices. But if the other festivals expand their offering without public subsidy, it is unlikely to replace the performances lost from the national tours, because private companies can only afford to present their work at a much higher ticket price and, in many cases, on a membership basis. The logical conclusion being that opera will continue to exist here, but it will become ever more inaccessible to the general public.

So the $64,000 question is: why is it important for opera to be subsidised? And what is the role of a subsidised opera company in the UK today?

To be continued…