Mark Wigglesworth: ENO cut its throat when it cut its operas
NewsThe former English National Opera usic director, in an article for the Guardian in the past hour, blames successive board for losing sight of the company’s core purpose.
Around the same time that I joined English National Opera as its music director in 2015, a £5m reduction in the company’s Arts Council grant generated a heated debate as to how that shortfall should be met. There were many of us who argued that the loss of income could be absorbed by making creative changes that maintained the quality and quantity of operas performed.
The ENO board however, followed the advice of management consultants from McKinsey who believed that the easiest way to solve the problem was simply to perform opera less often. The dramatic decline in the number of operas produced, alongside a reduction in the contracts of many of the singers, was a choice that was always going to make it hard to justify maintaining full-time public funding in the future. The idea that you could expect the same amount of taxpayers’ money for doing less of the kind of work that required it was clearly problematic.
Spot-on.
Read on here.
They should maybe be asking why the English Arts Council has funded, and in the new round continues to fund Welsh National Opera. Could it be because WNO tours full productions to a number of venues round England?
The ACE funding is specifically for its (fabulous) touring to Milton Keynes, Bristol, Plymouth, Birmingham, Llandudno, Liverpool, Oxford & Southampton. Its core activities in Wales are funded by the Arts Council of Wales, at £4.5m.
In fact, WNO tours to the Llandudno in Wales. ACE don’t fund them to tour to the (mythical?) Llandudno in England.
But hasn’t the latest round removed WNO’s touring funding, as well as that of Glyndebourne?
I notice the ENO accounts mention a mere £671,000 spent on staff costs and overheads for “raising funds”.
Perhaps someone with more experience of finance can comment but that just looks like a financial black hole.
Every time I hear “McKinsey,” I think of RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, in US parlance).
McKinsey. Again. There is now a book about exactly how – and where – they spread their poison. And then charge again (and again) for “responding” to the messes they have made.
I worked at ENO for years & it has to be said the place is completely besieged by toxic nastiness and in-fighting. It’s like a sort of horrid cult. Truly dreadful. So much bullying goes on. It’s a shame a national institution is being held to ransom in this way. Time for a change.
Sincere question: do you think a move to another city could change that toxic culture?
(I mean, a move would change quite a lot — including personnel, many of whom may be unwilling to relocate from London.)
ENO should have become the champion of Opera written in English worldwide, they needed a differentiator, their biggest successes were operas by Britten and contemporary US composers, as recently as 2 years ago, I don’t remember if pre or post pandemic, Akhenaten was a great success and more daring than the slightly “sanitised” NY Met outing, their worse failures were sorry stagings of operas that frankly don’t benefit from a translation (Carmen, Aida), a viable credible solution to their problems was staring them in the face.
When I started to see musicals staged in The Coliseum I knew they have lost their marbles, or was it perhaps when they named that young, inexperienced, opera illiterate woman to a position of responsibility? I don’t know, maybe was a drip-drip-drip of incompetence.
I really wish they stay in London, but wherever they continue, hopefully, they should think hard about what ethos a company with the words National and English in its name should have.
Which young woman? Genuine question!
Precisely! When they cut the “O” in ENO.
You can bet that whatever the business problems at ENO are they are of a deep and systemic nature and McKinsey did their best to save a sinking ship. McKinsey has always attracted the criticism of schadenfreude and people don’t readily talk about its successes but they are there alright and it is self-evident that they are good at what they do. If you think financial efficiency is not important in the arts you’ve misunderstood something basic about the way the world works.
Mark Wigglesworth is entitled to his opinion but he is frankly playing toy soldiers without any grasp of the battles he imagines he is fighting.
McKinsey never worked with/on ENO- one of their ex-junior employees did.
Wigglesworth was the ENO Music Director. He knows exactly what he is talking about, from the inside.
An excellent article by Mark Wigglesworth, well worth reading. It is, of course a great shame he didn’t stay as ENO Music Director – he is a fine conductor and was, I believe popular with singers and musicians. But he has a conscience, which didn’t seem to sit well with the ENO Management at the time.
Worth noting his suggestion that ENO actually needs a ‘new, state-of-the-art space’. This was, of course mooted many years ago when it became clear that the Coliseum was not the right place for Opera in repertory. As I recall, the suggested site was the waste land next to the RFH, but naturally the plan was vetoed as too expensive.
I suspect that had the Government at the time pressurised and enabled ACE to be creative by insisting on a new building that actually worked, ENO might still be the success story that is was in the halcyon Pountney-Elder-Jonas days.
Instead ACE has, sadly, given in to Government pressure of quite a different nature.
Great conductor but no idea about finance. ENO can’t benefit from the sale of the Coli as it’s mortgaged to ACE. ENO’s finances were on a sound footing when it got back into the NPO in 2018 with commercial musicals subsidising opera. Pity so much money was wasted and diverted away from opera since then.