The Guardian: Arts Council hates opera
NewsEverything Arts Council England has navigated in the past decade has been in the direction of pleasing the political left and the general mass of liberals who demonstrate for fashionable causes.
Its assault on opera – both by means of financial cuts and by general disdain – has been justified by a massive new report that leads precisely nowhere.
But ACE suffered two massive setbacks this week. The Labour leader Keir Starmer came out as a lover of ‘elitist’ classical music and opera, and the leftist Guardian demolished its opera report.
Under the headline ‘In the name of anti-elitism, Arts Council England has declared war on opera and excellence,’here’s a clip from Catherine Bennett’s op-ed:
For an organisation so full of surprises – one day on funding, another on restricting free speech – Arts Council England remains remarkably consistent on one point: like many people, it just can’t be doing with opera. Or not, anyway, with most of what’s on offer, what with its unlikely heroics and seducers and obsession with “good” singing.
Can you believe, ACE offers in a new report about opera in England (“Let’s Create: Opera and Music Theatre Analysis”), which follows on from its opening assault on opera in 2022, how much of the most frequently staged repertory was written over 100 years ago? By literally dead people?
That some of opera’s most acclaimed productions – when they don’t radically re-imagine older work – are in fact new, or composed in recent years, has not deterred ACE’s authors from assembling a sort of Monteverdi-shaming graph, in which advanced age in a popular opera evidently indicates creative sterility/critical absence of relevance. That opera critics put up with it would be amazing, if they were not, ACE’s authors have also established, excessively long serving “and almost exclusively writing from a classical music perspective”. If they can’t be defunded by ACE, these collaborators can at least be exposed.
One way or other, ACE faces demolition by the next government.
Why not start supporting rap, pop and other commercial stuff so England becomes even more stupid than it currently is?????
I feel the report’s distinguished authors have not had their due.
Oliver Mantell
https://www.theaudienceagency.org/our-team/oliver-mantell
“Oliver leads on sector evidence, providing insights into cultural audiences to support colleagues and the wider sector. These include the Cultural Participation Monitor and Audience Spectrum. … He is also a board member for Grimm & Co, an apothecary to the magical and children’s writing charity in Rotherham. … Oliver has a BA in English Language and Literature (Lincoln, Oxford) and an MA in Cultural Policy and Management (Sheffield Hallam)”
Tamsin Cox
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/clas/people/tamsin.cox
PhD candidate in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
“My research looks at the status and role of ‘cultural policy studies’ as an academic field in debates concerning the ‘value’ of culture in public policy in Britain. My study will consider both historical and contemporary academic material which constitutes the academic contribution/intervention in this area, and consider what claims are made for the purpose and application of such work. It will look particularly at the ways in which different kinds of knowledge and knowledge production are privileged or validated over others in certain discourses, and what the reasons for this are.”
Has anyone noticed that the ACE authors were privileged to be supported by a panel that includes Jan Younghusband, by far the worst BBC executive I had to deal with in the last ten years (see Slipped Discs of old for info on her dishonesty and ignorance).
I pity anyone that has to engage with the bullshit in this report in a serious way.
The section on how “opera performances in England were heavily focused on a core repertoire… of over 100 years old” was particularly depressing.
There are some interesting statistics about what is performed and where, followed by the conclusion that such old operas although they are popular are somehow not relevant to modern audiences (who presumably disagree or they would not go). How patronising and judgmental.
Sentences with vague statements like this are common: “Some contributors to this study feel that the stories which opera and music theatre tells are failing to connect fully with contemporary society.”
In other words, although the statistics they present show the popularity of the core operas (presumably because people connect to them and love them), the report writers clearly think they know better what should be performed.
Agenda-driven illogical nonsense, not fit for cat litter. How depressing for all the extrardinary people doing world-class work all across the UK.
Present good work and people will come but it doesn’t happen without money.
These people at ACE seem very hung up on librettos. Do they stop to think that a lot of interest in older operas is about the MUSIC? Of course some plots are silly. Or convoluted. Every opera lover has known that since time immemorial.
The ACE bandits do not, simply put, seem to have a clue what they are talking about. I was very heartened to see such a strong attack on their woke rubbish in The Guardian this morning.
Not all people who may lean left politically are simple-minded wokeists artistically. I know: I speak as someone raised in the left, a strong advocate of civil rights, women’s rights. etc., and raised on opera and classical music, folk music, religious music. I still support the kind of civil rights I was brought up on, which meant equal rights for all, and the philosophies of Martin Luther King. What has been distorted is not the doing of the left but of a new stream of so-called social justice warriors who have little interest in justice and know sod-all about what a society is. And the ones who infect the ACE seem to know and understand absolutely nothing about the arts for which they are supposed to advocate.
“Some contributors to this study feel that the stories which opera and music theatre tells are failing to connect fully with contemporary society.”
I picked out that very same quote when I read the report and thought to myself who the hell are these contributors and what question was asked to elicit such an answer?
The real problem that we never truly tackle, which is pretty obvious to all of us who work in selling the art form, is that most Brits have been conditioned to think of opera as not being for them – that it is for the wealthy and privileged and is rigidly intertwined with the UK’s class system.
This is a lie which often gets perpetuated in media and, dare I say, by a few people in the industry itself, yet many of those people who think that it’s boring and not interesting will be the first to rise to a standing ovation to watch a young soprano sing opera on Britain’s Got Talent or listen to movie soundtracks that feature well-known classical works.
The deep-set frustration for me with ACE is that it exists to protect and champion art, and it is failing to do either of those things with its current decision-making.
If we want to see radical change in public perception around opera don’t decrease companies’ funding or apply rigid and pathetically arbitrary investment principles for them to jump through to see a single pound from the public purse. Instead, create a brand new proactive strategy to get more people to experience it, put £50million behind it over 4 years, and let’s throw open the doors and change hearts and minds.
Most people don’t think of opera at all. The issue with opera is the out of kilter level of public funding it gets, laid alongside the low level of public participation.. On the wider arts, contemporary political driven brain draining arts projects are equally of no interest to the vast majority of people.
Perhaps the problem is the arts community itself, withdrawing public funding from all bodies, might encourage them to create projects that engage with the audience out there, rather than driving them away by preaching at them, or boring them to death.
“The issue with opera is the out of kilter level of public funding it gets, laid alongside the low level of public participation.”
But it’s not out of kilter with its production costs; it’s intrinsically expensive. Greater public participation would not help unless the ROH, as an example, were playing to half empty houses, which it isn’t (although clearly things went awry with ENO and the Coliseum millstone).
The UK is not awash with opera companies but, apparently, we still have to carp about what little we have. It survives in spite of virtully no promotion on mainstream media, or education reaching children who would not normally think of opera, and there’s a fair chance that any attention it does receive will be of the “screeching fat lady” variety. Sadly, that’s where we are. Opera is not considered “normal”, except that when opera occasionally breaks through (eg: Nessun dorma, Duo des fleurs, or whatever) prejudices are pushed aside. The weird (to me) appeal of third rate crossover acts does at least reveal some latent interest.
It’s still a small part of government funding yet vast sums are lavished on other public buildings and projects with little or no adverse comment.
“virtually”
I don’t get it why people want to see those things more than once?? Imagine you read the same book all over again and again and again! And then, why would you want to read a book by an author who’s dead? What could he possibly say about my own life? Let alone that opera stuff like Montovani and the rest. It’s all terribly egoistic and arrogant…
Sally
Where to begin! Are you seriously suggesting that the first performance of any work should also be the last?
Does it not occur to you that people might relish the chance to see a role played by different people?
Philistinism rules. Nadine Dorries must be so thrilled.
It’s simple: I’m a modern woman and I want modern things, I want to know about my own time & society! I’m not dressed in my grandma’s silly garments & don’t eat her horrible porridge! I cannot understand that people don’t want to know about things that are of NOW, they are themselves now aren’t they? And this is not merely my own opinion, the great Pierre Boulez has said it himself many times, all the time. That he never became popular I don’t get, people are just too stupid!
Sally
Should we demolish the Tower of London, because it’s not modern?
I think you’ve missed Sally’s irony.
I was just about to say…
the great Pierre Boulez (as a conductor totally overrated) doesn’t show often in a program does he? Can’t you understand that his music isn’t overly appreciated? When will you finally understand and tell the truth?
Rest easy! An ‘Aunt Sally’ is “something set up as a target for disagreement or attack” [Collins Dictionary] – and when John Borstlap’s “Sally” writes a comment, JB is at his most ironic, with tongue firmly in cheek.
When faced with reports such as this, dark humour is one of the best forms of attack, as it’s hard to take such a report seriously. Except, and it’s a huge “except”, such thinking as is espoused in this report potentially affects the livelihoods of many thousands of people who work in the UK Arts sector, which (even if you don’t care a hoot about the Arts) generates a massive positive contribution to the UK’s balance sheet – music alone is worth £6.7 billion annually to the UK economy, with exports worth £4 billion [source: Musicians’ Union, 14.03.2024 – on which, if you look at the recent interview with Keir Starmer on the MU website, you can gain an insight into the Labour party’s potential future direction on culture, and particularly its intentions for widening access to the Arts].
Yes sarcasm is perhaps the only fitting response to something so ignorant.
Wasn’t Mantovani the guy Raymond Leppard arranged back in the 1960s?
Nice to see the Guardian is arguing with data
No mention in The Guardian, or – as far as Googling shows me – in any medium other than SD, of that almost suicidial idiocy of the ENO Beginners Guide.
I am torn. Idiocy like that should be exposed. On the other hand, I have many, many fond memories of ENO going back more than 50 years, so if this issue gets through under the radar I shall feel a sense of relief.
Alas, I suspect that ACE will be holding this as an arrow in its quiver for its next assault on ENO.
People forget that Kier Starmer is not only married to a Jew and celebrates Shabbat on Friday nights with his family as a Christian, but is also a musician. If my memory serves me right, a flautist at the Guildhall – or flutist for Americans!
A clever touch of anti Starmerism, anti semitism, and anti Americanism. Brava!
It is historicist thinking which leads to such misunderstandings about ‘art from the past’. The best art / music that survived the passing of time proves that it has qualities that are not locked-up in time and place. This is a reality, and not ‘conservatism of audiences’. Burn the museums? Destroy the cathedrals, palaces, paintings, furniture, everything that reminds us of superior aesthetics – in comparison to our own very poor times?
There is something deeply sick in this thinking which is the heart of modernism as an ideology. It is superficial and ignorant and juvenile – and easy: you simply apply a framework over something that relieves you of any further thought, and hoopla! you know what to do. And in the process you deprive yourself of things, of experiences, that may be of great value to yourself.
Give this ‘political left’ and ‘liberal’ knocking nonsense a rest. The enemy to state-funded art, classical music, and opera is, and always has been, the profit obsessed conservatives. The debate about ‘elitism’ is demonstrably a smokescreen for philistine right wing neo-liberals.
Quite right. Let’s hope something changes after the election.
A friend emailed me this article yesterday. I had no idea I could ever find myself in complete agreement with a Guardian article ever again since its 1980s glory days but there you are. Catherine Bennett is spot-on.
Sorry, revisionist “Regie” directors, you’re apparently doomed as well. Nothing you do will rescue or save Opera.
If the best hope UK opera has is that Keir Starmer comes riding to its rescue, then that’s not a good sign.
He might appoint a Culture Secretary who is less of an insult to culture creators than Nadine Dorries.
This is very true. I produced, with Musica Lirica Opera,The Magic Flute with adults and 30 children playing the 3 boys (kids’ choir rather than soloists) at Blackpool’s Grand Theatre in 2018. Afterwards we got a meeting with ACE to try for funding to do more of the same. Imagine: 30 working class kids singing Mozart (and loving it) in one of Britain’s most deprived towns. Did we get help. None. But if we took it around prisons we might! How? What would child licensing say to that?
Don’t think blaming the left helps to understand the problem. I know scores of conservative minded people who hate opera and have taste varying from football to cars.
I have not yet read the report in full, but I am astonished that the Arts Council has taken the extraordinary decision to bracket two extremely different art forms together in a SINGLE sector: the “opera and music theatre sector” ! I am a great, longtime and committed fan of both “sectors”, but all they have in common is music and singing. Music theatre usually has tiny orchestras and the sounds they and the singers produce is (has to be!) miked.
Increasingly, music theatre outstrips the high prices usually complained of for opera performances. The wish of current music-theatre spectators to intrude in the performances by singing along, over-enthusiastic applause not to mention eating popcorn and opening noisy sweets has no parallel in opera houses. And surely the audiences for the two art forms are significantly different? Has there been any reliable evidence on this factor? My guess is that although a significant number of operagoers go to musicals, a far smaller proportion go in the reverse direction.
When did musicals start to be called “music theatre”? Is it an Americanism that has crept in? Is it a way of raising the status of musicals as a serious art form? Does anyone say “I’m off to the musical theatre this evening”? Perhaps operas should be called “opera theatre”!