Berlin has several times more subsidy than the whole of Great Britain
NewsFrom an interview with the Berlin agent Karsten Witt, former head of London’s South Bank centre:
Here in Berlin you live like in paradise. In London I had experienced the capital of music commerce as Chief Executive of the Southbank Centre. In Berlin there are many times the subsidies that are available in Great Britain for the whole country. Of course, one asks oneself the anxious question of how long politics in Germany will be maintained. But all major cultural institutions are making great efforts to reach the general population and young people in particular. And Berlin is not only characterized by three large opera houses and large orchestras, but also by the rich independent scene…
Is Schadenfreude originally a German noun?
More here.
The public funding for the arts in Germany and France is more than $12 billion for each country. In the USA, it is about $150 million which is 1/80th the amount. On a per capita basis, about 1/240th the amount.
If California had the same number of full time professional orchestras per capita as Germany (about one for every 600,000 people,) it would have about 60 (instead of 2.) If it had the same number of full time opera houses per capita (about one for every one million people,) it would have about 30 full time opera houses instead of zero. (The San Francisco Opera only has a half year season.) These numbers are difficult for Americans to comprehend.
One of the main reasons cultural funding in the USA is so low is that a cultured citizenry would demand social democracy as their form of government–a system like all Europeans have and which provides a higher quality of life. In the USA, a wider base of intelligent culture would be disruptive, a kind of subversion that would lead to a transformation of our economic and political structures. Public cultural funding in the USA will therefore always be virtually non-existent. Our status quo is based on cultural, social, and political ignorance. This sounds like a radical statement, but it’s pretty much just a plain fact.
Much as I would like to see Germany’s wealth of culture here in the U.S., I would note that Moscow, at least, is as rich in such offerings as Berlin, with a lot of government support (in some ways too much). And they’re not particularly democratic there.
True about the wide support of the arts in Moscow, but cultural offerings have different effects in different societies. In the USA, greater support for the so-called fine arts would lead to a much more progressive society. It is a very different context than Russia’s long history of repression.
The arts programs of the New Deal are a good example. The Federal Theater Project existed for four years, from 1935 to 1939. Within a year it employed 15,000 people who created about 1200 productions (not including radio.) It played to an estimated 30 million people in more than 200 theaters nationwide, as well as in parks, schools, churches, clubs, factories, hospitals and closed-off streets. It was shut down within four years because conservative politicians found its programs too leftist–i.e. not inline with things like the racial and class values of American society at the time.
From 1935 to 1943, the WPA hired about 10,000 visual artists who collectively created more than 100,000 paintings and murals and over 18,000 sculptures during the program’s 8 years of existence. A consistent goal of the WPA was to support and celebrate art in smaller cities and not just the big ones. It also focused on documenting and celebrating our “minority” cultures. There were many murals created that illustrated progressive thought at the time. Sadly, many were destroyed for exactly that reason.
The Federal Theatre of the Air began weekly radio broadcasts on March 15, 1936. It presented an average of 3,000 programs annually on commercial stations and the NBC, Mutual and CBS networks. Radio divisions were also created in 11 states.
Alas, all the programs were eventually shut down because the disruptions of WWII allowed reactionary Senators to slander the programs as too “socialist.” Sadly, today even the Democratic party has become part of the “too-socialist” mindset as we saw in its sabotage of Bernie Sanders.
These numbers, however, show that we could quickly have arts support similar to the Europeans. It would happen in the USA, but its two party system often does not give the people genuinely democratic choices.
DC’s National Symphony was a product of the WPA.
As the original justification for these New Deal programs was to create jobs for people in artistic fields when jobs were scarce, the fact that the war effort pulled in nearly everyone meant that those programs would have been suspended regardless of what conservatives did. Blame Truman, Eisenhower and others for not reviving them when the war ended. The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities created by Lyndon Johnson might have compensated, but there has never been the will to fund them nearly to the levels seen in Europe. That being said, support for such programs must be grown from the ground up. Students in most European nations receive vastly more exposure to classical music than American students normally do. You can’t desire what you are unaware of. Simply to form dozens of new orchestras without the audience for that would be folly. They would be playing to a sparse audience. You have to start in the schools. That does not mean we should not be supporting the arts, just that it must be what the audience is there for, at least short term. We need to create the desire for it.
California has at least 3, not 2. Still far from 60, though!
Well, they’re right. It’s a question of priorities, not just in favour of domestic education but also in terms of tourism. The arts generate much more revenue than they cost the taxpayer. Win-win.
It is testament to the utter stupidity and inherent philistinism of UK politicians that they are incapable of understanding this simple commercial fact. Even the super number-cruncher Sunak doesn’t realise what additional harm he’s doing to London’s attractiveness to visitors from home and abroad by denying ENO the limited funding they morally and economically deserve.
Mediocrity “deserves” NO funding. ENO is only that – mediocre at best. Frame it any emotional way you want: the are anything but world class. C list directors now, B list conductors, elderly white male British directors…. Yawn. Time to go, ENO-NO. Use the money for a new smaller company focusing on chamber operas in smaller spaces. Support more emerging UK talent to get work until they are ready for appropriate large houses that sing opera in original languages.
There is no sign of Schadenfreude in the original interview. The quotation you have highlighted is only a very tiny part of a much more wide-ranging reflection on the state of music in Germany.
Karsten Witt was until you mentioned him a long-forgotten disaster at the South Bank, even worse than Jude Kelly and he stayed only a short time before he “moved on” to pastures new.
Yes Germany has always enjoyed much stronger support for the arts but that’s hardly news.
I think Britain performs well taking the levels of subsidy into account. Little chance of any improvement so long as anti-elitist/anti-white/inverted snobbery etc nonsense prevails.
The sad side of this is that, although opera and classical music are not for everybody (nothing is), I’m sure it is capable of enhancing the lives of far more people than it currently does. It breaks through occasionally but then progess seems to falter. If only the obstacles and negative attitudes listed above would get out of the way.
If British institutions fail it is precisely because they only appeal to audiences whose love of classical music begins and ends at “Gardiner conducts Beethoven again”. Let’s examine:
Step 1: the musicians, already paid below the poverty line, are playing the exact same repertoire each year with the mindset that this will please their donors. Therefore they really do view their jobs as clock-in/clock-out paychecks, and the playing suffers greatly.
Step 2: conservative conductors are more than happy to re-appear with an orchestra that can play on auto-pilot. However, the UK has very specific unwritten standards that you must first have made a name for yourself on the continent if you wish to conduct here. The continent receives a lot more government funding for new music, therefore any conductor who wants to elevate themselves beyond the Austrian-Germanic standard repertoire will be more attracted towards the progressive minded continent. Anyone left here is either too boring for the musicians to care about, or too frustrated with the musicians’ apathy to do anything interesting.
Step 3: audiences feel that the musicians and conductors are not on the same page, they get bored with performances, they vow never to return. Consistently the most sold out concerts are by guest orchestras who bring their own music and new exciting repertoire to our stale concert halls.
Step 4: repeat
UK music institutions love to shoot themselves in the foot. They won’t hire outsiders unless they have a proven track record with a European (better paid) institution, and they don’t pay their employees the full worth of their work that matches the prestige of the organizations.
Where would a UK orchestra get the extra cash from?
Government support, like all other orchestras in Europe.
“BERLIN HAS SEVERAL TIMES MORE SUBSIDY THAN THE WHOLE OF GREAT BRITAIN”
Is this viewed simply as ‘good’?
I thought things that needed subsidy were… not popular enough?
Hear that a lot.
Pretty dim assessment, in my opinion, not taking into account the economies of live, unamplified performance.
lots of truth in it and you find so many awful useless performances which are just waste of taxpayers money
Socialists should finally go back to their roots and help the poor and not describing them as deplorable….what a rotten world that created Trump and Boris
the arrogance of the socialist they once more are mostly involved in the latest Bruxelles corruption
What figures do you have to support these claims, Tristan? You sound like my grandfather after he’s had too much to drink.
I have never heard any socialist refer to the poor as “deplorable” or any other slur. Must be your imagination. For socialists and other left-leaning types, assisting the poor and middle class, supporting the fine arts, fighting for equal rights for everyone, moderating corporate greed and irresponsibility, saving the natural world and endangered species, and making sure the rich don’t control everything, and pay their fair share, are not either/or, they are all of the above. It’s called putting human values ahead of profits.