Iceland gets a national opera (England just ditched one)
OperaThe Icelandic minister for culture and business has set aside $5.8 million for the formation of a national opera, as a division of the national theatre, starting next year. Early performances will be given in the Harpa concert hall (pic).
The new company will employ 12 solo singers and 16 part-timers in the chorus.
England, meanwhile (don’t even go there).
More here.
So, this National Opera is to be a new division of the National Theatre of Iceland.
Does this structure already operate elsewhere in the world?
There were attempts in Lublin, Poland, to create an opera company through merging the local philharmonic orchestra with the local musical theatre. The idea of merging the two was dropped after an outcry of protests from Poland’s classical music circles. But the opera company was established anyway, as it was the funding authorities wish to give more splendour to the city. Just had a look at the repertoire. Mostly musicals, operettas and shows for chidren, with opera productions few and far between. So perhaps it’s only a matter of changing the musical theatre’s name to more “serious” against increased public funding.
Good for them. We hear everywhere that ‘opera is dying’ but there appears to be ever more interest in it. Britain should maybe not be used as a reference.
Perhaps, but this National Opera isn’t an example of “ever more interest in [opera].” It is in stead of the recently defunded The Icelandic Opera.
Exactly so, and that is even stated clearly in the report SD links to. What puzzles me is that singers and chorus are to be employed, and a director and ‘other staff’, but no mention is made of an orchestra.
Just because something has ‘English’ as part of its name does not make it a national company. When, if, ENO moves to the ‘provinces’ does it forfeit the claim to be national or is it the fact that it has not been such for decades? I say again, the way in which ACE, ENO, and the metropolitan establishment have condescended towards the rest of the English regions makes their possible move to Manchester one that we should tell them to stick where the sun don’t shine.
To be fair, the artists at ENO (and I believe them on this) have said that, while they don’t want to upend their lives by completely relocating, they do want (and have for quite some time) to tour England, something which they have been forbidden to do by — well, I forget by what, but I’m sure several people here know.
But doesn’t basing it in Manchester make it more rather than less ‘national’?
There was a suggestion in a Yes, Minister about arts funding that the whingeing National Theatre should cease to have a behemoth of a building so it could spend more of its budget on productions rather than bricks and mortar and use existing venues throughout the country, which it would tour, thus making it more rather than less national. It was of course sneered out of the room, and the episode, but I have occasionally wondered whether companies calling themselves ‘national’ ought to be constructed exactly so.
I do see that a company may want a base, and a capital is entitled to be the base for the National Theatre, but they could have a good rehearsal building with a scale stage and put on their plays in the West End.
Heresy, no doubt.
Errr…I mean, last year the Icelandic government stripped all state funding their only full-time national opera company, after 43 years (described by local commentators as “a cultural disaster”). Now it gets replaced by an as-yet unformed and almost certainly substantially smaller state-run organisation that will operate as a subsidiary of a non-musical theatre.
Explain to me again what we’re supposed to be finding so exemplary about all this?