Much ink has been spilled about the recent announcement by Arts Council England (ACE) on the financial settlement offered to its National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) for the period 2023-26. There have been winners: organisations newly admitted to the portfolio (e.g. Pegasus Opera and Opera Up Close) and a few whose grant has been uprated (Birmingham Opera Company and English Touring Opera), although in many cases that uplift will only just cover increased costs due to inflation, and in the case of Opera North (1% increase) not even that. But many more opera companies have lost funding.
To summarise: the Royal Opera House which presents ballet and opera remains ACE’s biggest client, but must now deal with a 10% funding cut. Welsh National Opera, which is part-funded by ACE for its touring programme in England, saw its grant slashed by a third. Glyndebourne, which receives funding to subsidise an autumn tour of its festival productions, has been handed a 50% cut. And, attracting the most attention, the hundred-year-old English National Opera (ENO) which currently receives the second-largest ACE grant in order to present large-scale, accessible opera at affordable prices, featuring primarily UK-based singers, has been cut from the portfolio completely.
I did my own calculation based on the figures readily available on the ACE website (errors are therefore mine). Comparing the NPO funding for opera companies across the scale from 2022 to 2023, the total awarded will fall from ca. £60m to ca. £43m. That’s a cut in opera funding of over £17m per annum.
ACE big wigs Darren Henley and Claire Mera-Nelson have defended these cuts by trying to position what they unhelpfully call ‘grand opera’ against ‘opera in car parks’, claiming that audiences for the former are down, and decreeing that the latter is the future of this artform, rather than recognising both as integral and interdependent elements of the UK opera ecosystem. In service of this ambition, ACE has offered ENO a transitional sum of £17m over three years to relocate to Manchester and downsize, with the starting gun on the process of massive redundancy firing when the current funding package expires. Chair of the Board Harry Brunjes told MPs this week that ENO would in fact close down in April if there was no funding alternative in place – the idea that such enormous change for an organisation with over 300 employees could be planned and executed within this short timeframe, in the middle of the ENO season, is ludicrous, not to mention the research and planning required to find a new venue in Manchester or elsewhere when no such obvious venue exists.
Twitter is aflame with conspiracy theories about ACE delaying its white smoke announcement and hurried changes of plans and governments. The reality is likely more mundane – ACE was instructed by the DCMS to make major cuts to its budget and re-allocate its client base outside London. Salami slicing was no longer sufficient – there would have to be a sacrifice of one of the big London clients.
Why is all this happening? Simply because the level of funding allocated to ACE is insufficient to subsidise England’s cultural institutions, and opera is not a priority. UK opera companies are already underfunded compared with their European competitors. On the other side of the Atlantic, public subsidy of the arts is almost nil, and philanthropic support (encouraged through generous tax breaks) massive. The UK sits between the European and American models, but has been steadily moving westwards. Philanthropy in the UK, however, has not kept pace with cuts in public subsidy, and there is no similar UK tax incentive programme. Additionally, there is a thriving English private opera festival world which is funded through a mixture of membership, high ticket prices and donations. In short, opera philanthropists and corporate sponsors are already well engaged. Plus, a settlement at standstill whether to Opera North or the NHS is in fact a big cut in times of high inflation - and a reduction is brutal. It is hard to see how the remaining opera companies can manage without redundancies, reducing output and increasing ticket prices.
ACE has attempted to brand this unprecedented cut to opera as an exercise in reshaping the artform for the future. They talk about opera in non-traditional spaces and on tablets, but it’s a smokescreen – just like the proposed ENO move to Manchester. It’s a way for the ACE bosses to maintain a figleaf of propriety when senior figures in the industry, for example Sir David Pountney, suggest they should resign rather than force the shuttering of the only opera company committed to performing its work in English. Many critics have asked why London doesn’t need two opera houses, but it does need two Tates. You’d have to ask the Chair of Arts Council England, Nick Serota (Director of the Tate 1988-2017).
All of this pits artforms and supplicant arts organisations against each other in a Hunger Games style battle for the last remaining scraps of public funding via a broken - and broke - system. These companies invest huge resources in applying for subsidy, and removal from the national portfolio is an existential threat. There has been fantastic solidarity for ENO from the opera companies who remain in the portfolio, alongside the private organisations. Opera is a small and interconnected world, and it’s clear that this is an attack against the artform itself. Combined with a huge outpouring of support on social/mainstream media, a demonstration organised by Equity last week, and a petition created by star baritone Bryn Terfel, this reflects the horror that ENO will - probably - have to close.
Where will all this ‘car park’ and ‘tablet’ opera come from, if there are fewer companies creating large-scale, mainstream opera? Opera onscreen has to come from somewhere, and since this remains primarily digital exploitation of existing stage work, that means it’s created in a theatre, by an opera company. The market leader in this field is the Metropolitan Opera of New York – arguably the grandest of grand opera addresses.
Birmingham Opera Company (BOC), established and run until his death by the visionary Graham Vick, is one of the funding ‘winners’ - they got a significant, and very well-deserved, funding uplift. In my opinion, they produce some of the best opera available anywhere. They run a small permanent staff and produce one largescale opera a year, engaging on a meaningful and profound level with non-professional participants alongside international soloists and the world-class CBSO orchestra. BOC is a massive employer of freelancers – but only for a few months of the year. The other major purveyors of these ‘car park operas’ are – you guessed it – the very same organisations that present the dreaded ‘grand operas’ the rest of the time. Scottish Opera has done Candide. ENO itself produced a ‘drive-in’ La Boheme. How would they have produced these events without their infrastructure, expertise and funding? And what of the audiences? A typical BOC production offers its tickets at a flat £20 rate to a few hundred people at each of its five performances. It presents its works in non-theatre spaces which are not only costly to fit out for theatrical performance, but can accommodate only a fraction of the audience numbers of a conventional opera house. It is an expensive model. In comparison, the London Coliseum (home of the ENO) has more than 2000 seats and they present around ten different opera productions per year. On a ‘value for money’ basis, every ACE pound is far more efficiently spent at ENO than BOC.
This is a totally stupid way of assessing opera of course, and it’s equally stupid to fund BOC more generously at the expense of another opera company. All this means is that less opera will be produced, and fewer people can see it. Add to this pile of woe the fact that 300 staff members (including chorus and orchestra players) will now lose their jobs, and a lot of freelance employment will vanish when ENO no longer exists and when the cuts elsewhere start to bite, all of which leads to a heavily denuded opera ecology in the UK. Can the uplifted and new-entry organisations alongside the private opera houses fill the gap created by the loss of ENO and cuts to the other companies? I doubt it. This is far from ‘levelling up’. What will they – we – do now? Brexit has made it harder to work abroad. I guess our next job could be in cyber?