My Lords, it is a great pleasure, particularly after listening to that very interesting debate on Northern Ireland, to come to a very different topic: the future of opera in this country. I tried at the time of the general election to obtain a QSD and succeeded—but the election stopped it.
This is a particularly important and significant debate. Mainstream opera—and I am talking about mainstream opera—is, in my view, one of the greatest musical art forms in the world, and it enriches our society. It encompasses orchestras, soloists and choruses, and it is spectacular, musical and dramatic. My father was a coal miner. When he was a young man, his parish priest introduced him to “Cavalleria Rusticana” on 78s. The idea that opera is somehow elitist is completely nonsensical—certainly where I come from in Wales, but also in our country as a whole. You will pay more to go to a pop concert or a football match than you will to go to an opera. The idea that it is only rich people who go to the opera needs to be scotched.
Opera is one of our greatest institutions, but it is in crisis: in serious trouble. Over the last number of years, there has been a serious reduction in productions and performances of opera. Of the four main opera companies in England and Wales, excluding Glyndebourne, three have suffered considerable contraction in the work they do. Comparing our country with others, Germany has 59 opera companies and France has 17. In other European countries there are many others. But we have only those four.
As a consequence of the cuts, to which I will refer in a moment, there has been a considerable drop in audience numbers. It is not because people do not want to go to the opera but because, throughout the whole country, there is reduced opportunity for them to do so.
Even more worrying is the situation outside London, which is now very grave: there has been a serious decline in touring opera in England and Wales. For example, the Welsh National Opera, with which I have some affinity, used to go to cities such as Liverpool, Southampton, Oxford, Birmingham and others. It still does, but, as I will explain later on, in far fewer numbers.
Mainstream opera is inevitably much more costly than other art forms. It is 10 times more costly to produce an opera than drama, for example. Since 1945, public funding has been the cornerstone of mainstream opera companies. We have the Royal Opera, Welsh National Opera, English National Opera and Opera North. The last 15 years has, as I have said, seen a serious decline in the number of productions and performances.
The cuts to opera have been terrifying. I will give your Lordships some examples. In 2012-13, there were 455 performances of opera in England and Wales; in 2023-24, there were 294. Outside London it is worse: in 2012-13, there were 195 performances and in 2023-24 just 87. Last year, we saw a 40% drop in the number of performances outside London for our people to go to outside the capital city. It is not the same for ballet, dance or drama. The result has been huge inflation costs continuing for opera companies, and they simply cannot maintain orchestras and choruses. It is a spiral of decline that is simply terrifying.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Murphy. I agree with practically everything he said. I start by declaring my interests, but not the usual ones recorded in the register: I am passionate about opera and have a very firm belief that the UK needs a strong, sustainable opera sector.
Unfortunately, opera is phenomenally expensive, and it is a fact of life that it cannot exist solely on box office and other commercial income. On the other hand, not all opera is dependent on public subsidy, and some wonderful opera manages without. The very large programme at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Wagner-based programme at Longborough are but two excellent examples. These rely on the generosity of donors and, in many cases, a family whose passion for opera has provided the financial and artistic foundations. But donations cannot support the whole of opera in our country.
As the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, explained, the public subsidy to opera has been shrinking in real terms, which has had very significant impacts. This has led to less opera being produced. Very few companies have the ability to magic up replacement income streams. For example, the output of English National Opera, to which I will return, has significantly reduced in recent years and is certainly much lower than when the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, and I sat on ENO’s board.
As we have heard, touring has also been reduced. Glyndebourne used to receive a grant which allowed it to tour. When that was axed, Glyndebourne stopped touring, with the result that many thousands of people who cannot reach East Sussex or cannot obtain or afford tickets for the festival have lost out. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, about what has happened to Welsh National Opera and to Opera North.
Who made these decisions? At the end of the day the Government are responsible but, as in so many areas of public sector activity, they have outsourced the detailed decision-making to an unelected and unaccountable quango in the form of Arts Council England. I believe the Government need to take a long, hard look at whether ACE is fit for purpose.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, in his very powerful speech. I agree with everything that he said.
The final blazing “Amen” of the “Messiah”, which we in the Parliament Choir sang a week ago in St John’s Smith Square, was followed by a moment of profound stillness and silence. Nothing moved, until someone in the audience broke the spell by exclaiming, “Wow!” A standing ovation followed. Our conductor, Nicholas O’Neill, had emphasised to us that Handel had gained his reputation in London as the composer of Italian opera, and that we were to approach the work not with heavy thumping religiosity but with the lighter rhythms of Handel’s operatic works. Why had Handel moved on from opera to a series of oratorios? The answer is, largely, cost. The “Messiah” could be performed in Dublin or in Chester—anywhere—and in theatres or in churches, with no scenery, no machinery, no costumes, which all made it more profitable. But a concert performance of opera can never tell the story as well as a fully staged presentation can. Storytelling is central to every culture in the world. Later, from the 18th century onwards, great composers explored the whole range of human experience. As the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, said, opera became the peak of western culture.
I was hooked at an early age. At 18, I sang the part of Master Ford in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Sir John in Love”, with the composer himself in the audience. His appreciative letters to the producer of those performances, Brian Trowell, and the conductor, Leon Lovett, are preserved in his archives.
It has been a pleasure to introduce two of my grandsons to opera in a number of productions of the Welsh National Opera in Llandudno. One of them is now studying music at Cardiff University; the other is taking a music course for A-level. The development of their musical interest illustrates how devastating it is that funding has been reduced for the three remaining touring opera companies, WNO, Opera North and Glyndebourne. Ironically, as more and more funding has been taken away over the years, more responsibility has been given to them to provide outreach as well as community, health and education work—out of the funds which used to support just the performance of opera.
My Lords, ultimately as a society we have to decide whether we want opera, and if we want it, we have to find a way to pay for it. I must declare an interest, having written three operas and with another opera in the pipeline, although, given the prognosis of the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, perhaps I should say, “Fingers crossed”. I was also on the board of the Royal Opera House for many years, chairman of its opera committee, and a member of the Arts Council panel that looked at provision—and underprovision—of opera in this country. That last experience is highly germane to our debate today since the panel was tasked with identifying areas that were underprovided for—less privileged areas in terms of opera reach. This we did and remedial action was achieved, thanks to companies such as the Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne touring, and Opera North. I soon realised that opportunity is everything—the chance to experience a life-affirming and sometimes life-changing transformation, as the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, mentioned.
More recently, the last Government instructed the Arts Council to move certain opera-making from London to the regions, as we have heard. I emphasise “instructed” because, as I understand it, this went completely against the previously observed conventions that Arts Council England should be free of political interference—indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, quite rightly told this House that opera funding was a matter for Arts Council England due to its status as an arm’s-length body. Try telling ENO that because the instruction has led, as we have heard, to many cuts at ENO and its partial move to Manchester, a city previously well served by Opera North. Indeed, I went to Manchester as a composer with Opera North. Naturally, I wish ENO well and I appreciate the welcome the company has received from Andy Burnham and others in Manchester. However, whether this really is in the long-term best interests of opera in this country is, I fear, debatable, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, for securing this important debate. From one coalmining family to another, I say that access to opera should be for all.
I speak in this debate primarily in support of the Welsh National Opera. As I was the youngest of seven siblings, my parents had to get a bit more creative with my name. They called me Carmen, after one of the most popular operas ever written. My mother watched the performance, her first opera, in the 1980s in what was formerly known as the Gaumont Theatre in Southampton, now the Mayflower, and she was taken by the story of a fiery woman.
Although named after an opera, I attended my first performance only a couple of years ago. It was a brand new opera by WNO, staged at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, called “Migrations”. It was a journey at the heart of the way that humans behave in the 21st century. Act 1 was a story of modern-day refugees struggling with the reality of living in another country, dealing with a different language and culture, having left their own behind through necessity. Act 2 focused on the experiences faced by those who chose to pack up their lives to help our NHS, only to face the prejudices of the racially troubled 1960s. The performance was a skilful example of storytelling. I am yet to watch “Carmen”, but it is on the list for the future.
As has been stated, the Welsh National Opera is funded by Arts Council England and Arts Council Wales in recognition of its work in both countries. WNO is the last remaining full-time international British opera company that also tours extensively across the UK. It runs projects on and off stage across England and Wales. As we are focused on Arts Council England funding in this debate, I shall share some examples of the health, education and community projects that WNO leads offstage in England. The CLEAR Project in Southampton is a charity empowering and assisting refugees and asylum seekers with advice services, English classes, work clubs and more. WNO has partnered with the project and has run sessions at the University of Southampton, teaching songs from Iran and Syria.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, on obtaining this debate at a suitably operatic time of the evening, and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, in the debate.
For those of us who know and love it, opera is the most enthralling, inspiring and uplifting art form of all. Unfortunately, as we have heard, it is also one of the most expensive. You really cannot do it full justice without an orchestra, talented actor-singers and designers, sets and costumes, large theatres, dramatic lighting and more. There are not enough people who know and love opera to protect it from accusations of elitism—unlike popular music or football, as the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, pointed out.
So it is hardly surprising that there are challenges facing the state funding of opera, which takes up such a large proportion of total arts funding. I was at an opera APPG event last week where a music professor, who had formerly worked for the Arts Council, suggested that, to preserve opera in the long term, opera lovers themselves might need to pay a greater share of the costs and rely less on the Government. But I wonder, picking up from something that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said, whether the Government could not do more to promote greater private support. Perhaps when they want to reduce public funding for opera, they could think about tax or other incentives—even public recognition through honours—to encourage private donors to replace some of the funds lost. Other countries do it: why can’t we?
Another challenge is to increase the audience for opera, to which the answer has to be education. I will illustrate this with two stories. Some of your Lordships may remember Frank Johnson, erstwhile editor of the Spectator. Frank came from a poor home in the East End and went to a sink school in Shoreditch, having managed to fail the 11-plus. The school provided children to appear in operas at Covent Garden. Frank discovered that he could get out of some of the maths lessons, which he hated, by volunteering for this.
My Lords, I was going to start by saying that I am very keen on opera, because I thought that might be quite an original way to start, but it turns out that I am not alone. It seems that everybody in this Chamber is, and that is very heartening.
I agree with those who said that, at its best, opera is the most complete and satisfying form of theatre ever imagined. I make no apology for saying that and believing it. It has given me some of the most exhilarating experiences of my life, as clearly it has to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I have also been close to the business of opera, as indeed he has, over the years in executive and non-executive roles, including as a member of the board of WNO and briefly, as the noble Lord knows, as chief executive of the Royal Opera House.
I have been involved with conservatoire training and seen at close quarters what it takes to acquire the skills needed to perform opera. My daughter is a professional opera singer and has been for 20 years. She is now also the artistic director and chief executive of OperaUpClose, to which I will return, a national touring company based in Southampton and included since 2023 in ACE’s national portfolio.
So I know something about the art form and something about the sector. But what I mostly am—to go back to my original point—and always have been, is a fan of opera in all its guises, and it is the variety of those guises that I want to touch on. I have loved and admired our big opera companies all my life. We have been told who they are. I would add to the four that have been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Murphy Glyndebourne and Scottish Opera. I know it does not fall within the purview of Arts Council England; none the less, it is part of the ecosystem, to which I will also return.
I am very dismayed by what has happened recently. My views about Arts Council England and the decisions it has taken recently are on the record and I am not going to repeat them. Over the years, these big companies have expanded what they do beyond their wonderful productions to encompass education, outreach, training and much else besides—as we have heard. They are also key local employers. Their work is crucial and they are right to deploy their formidable advocacy skills to defend their interests.
My Lords, like others, I will talk about funding, with particular reference to Welsh National Opera, and about Brexit.
My wife has told me that, living in the West Country, her first introduction to live opera happened as a teenager, when her mum, a schoolteacher, bought tickets to see Welsh National Opera at the Bristol Hippodrome. It was the first of many such visits, leading to a lifelong love of opera. No doubt many others, as we have heard, will have had similar experiences.
There are a number of points to be made here, but one of them is that WNO has, over the years, benefited, and continues to benefit, English audiences— although today the cuts have meant a reduction in such touring, with Liverpool now dropped as a touring venue. The current crisis—and it is a crisis—at WNO is, or should be, the joint responsibility of both the Welsh and British Governments, a point that cannot be emphasised enough.
If, as a society, we believe in an art form, we should fund it properly, irrespective of its relative expense. This means public funding. That is why the idea of an imagined “fair deal” for each of the arts or arts organisations is misguided, because different art forms demand extremely varying degrees of funding in order to thrive. That is a fact of artistic life. Although there is overlap, opera in a car park or a street is a different form from opera in a concert setting, which is different again from a full staging, yet there has to be a sense in which all opera will depend ultimately on the survival or otherwise of our larger companies.
Unlike Germany, we have very few large opera companies, as the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, pointed out in his excellent introduction. We should absolutely treasure these companies, rather than run them down, which is the direction that certainly Welsh National Opera is heading in, unless there is a significant turnaround. It is clear from the facts and figures—the facts include the loss, this weekend, of seven members of the chorus—that Chris Bryant was wrong when he recently said, in an Answer to a Written Question, that he is
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Arts Council England has made a number of seriously daft decisions over the last number of years. I will not go into how it justifies them, but the result has been there for everyone to see. Cuts have been made to the highest-cost art form, which is opera, and the only company to escape this spiral of decline—this doom loop—was the Royal Opera, largely, of course, because of the Royal Opera House income from many donors. But the other companies—English National Opera, Welsh National Opera and Opera North—have all suffered.
Your Lordships will have seen over the last number of years serious debate in the newspapers and elsewhere about what would happen if English National Opera—ENO—left London completely. I think that that has been renegotiated over the last year or so by the very effective chair of the ENO, and it has meant that it still has some integrity, but it is a reduced form. It is effectively a part-time opera with fewer performances than it traditionally had. It will operate in the north of England, but its base at the Coliseum will at least be continued.
Welsh National Opera is more seriously affected. We now have just 16 touring performances of Welsh National Opera in England and Wales, compared with 55 a decade ago. Opera North is down from 95 to 56 touring performances. Both companies operate on reduced terms, with loss of staff and opportunity. Mainstream opera outside London is now in great peril with a dispersal of singers, instrumentalists and management teams. We are faced with an enormous dilemma.
Happily, the Welsh Government are currently looking at their budget, and I am hopeful that they will give Welsh National Opera extra funding for it to continue. One of the problems that Arts Council England faced over the last year was a total lack of communication with the Arts Council of Wales, which meant that the very large cuts from Arts Council England, which gives money to Welsh National Opera because of its touring activities, were made without consultation. The combination of cuts to the Welsh and English Arts Councils meant that the WNO suffered considerably.
Opera needs, above all else, an immediate injection of cash. That is the only answer after 15 years of serious underfunding. We cannot wait until the next funding round of Arts Council England in 2027-28—that is too late. The DCMS must look seriously at the future of opera. If necessary, it must bypass the Arts Council. It would be best to work with it but to ensure that there is a continuance of opera in our country it needs this new cash injection. It happened 20 years ago with drama, and there is no reason it cannot now happen with regard to opera.
The Minister, or the Secretary of State, should meet Members of your Lordships’ House to discuss this important issue. There is a case for the DCMS to set up a special opera working group, working with the Welsh Government to ensure the future of opera. We should be looking too towards a national opera service.
The reason the Arts Council made the decisions it did some time ago was, we are told, because of levelling up. The opposite has occurred—with the complete reduction in performances and productions, it is in fact levelling down. So there is a serious need to relook at what is happening with our opera system.
Opera’s repertoire includes many of the supreme achievements of human imagination and incorporates more than all the major art forms put together. There is nothing quite like it. Unless we take this urgent action, we will wake up one morning and it will be gone.
The Government’s funding for ACE has not kept pace with inflation, but at the same time they have told ACE to put more money into the regions and move stuff out of London. Levelling up then became a crude weapon of destruction in ACE’s hands. As an opera fanatic, I want as many people as possible in this country to experience opera, but achieving that by weakening what is good in an already fragile ecosystem in order to spread resources around the country is a very high- risk strategy. It can and probably will inflict lasting damage on opera as a whole, and everyone will lose.
The evidence points to ACE not having a firm grasp of either what it takes to maintain a healthy system of opera provision or what will happen if parts of the system become unsustainable. Its decisions on ENO epitomise this. ENO was told with no notice whatever that it was to be demoted from the national programme and that it had to locate itself outside London. Instead of receiving around £12.5 million a year, it was to get £17 million over three years to make its transfer out of London. This decision did not make any sense at all and was incapable of execution within the resources allocated. ACE largely backed down on 2023 funding and, after a long process, gave ENO more money and a longer relocation timetable.
We now know that ENO will relocate to Manchester, where it will undertake some rather vaguely specified activities that do not look much like the output of a major opera company. It will also put on a cut-down season in London. I have no idea whether this will work as a solution, but I would not bet on it. ENO will certainly not be the major force in the opera world that it clearly once was. We may well be seeing English National Opera entering the last phase of its life, and that will impoverish us all. I cannot think of a more wasteful approach to ensuring that opera has a firm future in the UK.
The Government need to take responsibility and act. They must step into the opera space before ACE ruins it for good.
In England, many cities have lost their regular visit by a touring company, as the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has pointed out. Ordering the ENO to Manchester will not fill that gap. The consequences for Welsh National Opera are that, whereas it used to perform nine operas a year across three full seasons, the future looks like three to four operas across one extended season. Only 30 main-scale performances of these chosen works are planned for 2025-26. Spring performances in Llandudno and Bristol next year are now cancelled.
The recent announcement of a £755,000 grant from the Arts Council of Wales resilience fund is welcome but, with an in-year deficit of £2.7 million due to cuts in funding from the arts councils of England and Wales combined, a one-off payment like that will make no difference. Some 20% of the orchestra has been lost already since Covid and there is no funding to fill these pivotal seats in the orchestra pit. Twenty-five positions will still be lost in the administration staff, and the quality of WNO productions will suffer.
The chorus of the Welsh National Opera is always an exciting part of the evening. A group of 40 full-time choristers is now planned to be reduced to 20, supplemented by no more than eight freelance singers. Voluntary redundancy will have already reduced the number of full-time chorus singers to 23 by this coming Christmas. Talks are continuing but three strike days—strike days in opera—have been set aside for next February. Will DCMS work with the Welsh Government to come to terms with Equity in Wales to restore funding to the Welsh National Opera, and in particular to settle the chorus strike that nobody wants?
Labour must not let us down in Wales. It must ensure that the great tradition of opera performance is maintained. It has produced many stars and given so many chances to young singers and orchestral players and their contribution to the economy of Wales has been so great. I urge the Minister to act swiftly and to not destroy a tradition which has taken so long to build.
Among other changes to opera support were some devastating cuts across the board, not least to the excellent Welsh National Opera, which, along with other companies such as Glyndebourne touring, as I have just mentioned, actually took touring to those areas that we had identified as being underprovided. So will these cuts be reversed? Is it too late, I ask the Minister, to save musicians and singers at WNO? Indeed, should we not look at a more sensible way of funding opera? Is it really sensible for the Arts Council to look at small-scale, versatile companies, of which we have several, in the same light as multimillion-pound national companies? How can they conceivably compare?
Another effect of the recent cuts is that young singers and musicians have lost work opportunities. Touring was always a wonderful opportunity to try out young singers and give them experience, but that experience and the opportunity to make a living have been profoundly and further eroded by the effects of Brexit, so that singers are rarely now invited to perform. Research shows the quite astonishing decline in work opportunities abroad. It is necessary to understand that securing singers, casting singers and getting them in to replace sick principals—sometimes at 24 hours’ notice—depends on availability and having no problems with travel and visas. As a result, many European houses are avoiding hiring English singers altogether, despite their sight-reading abilities. Will the Government please attempt to reach a rapprochement with the EU to ease the rules on cabotage, visas and carnets so that singers, instrumentalists, pop groups, dance companies et al can once again spread what used to be our enviable cultural reputation beyond these shores and therefore contribute to the Treasury a huge amount of much-needed income?
I shall say a few words about why I think opera is so important. When I was on the board at the Royal Opera House, I initially had a problem with Wagner— I could not quite get it. Then I went to “The Ring”, conducted by Haitink, and it was as though I had been through some miraculous experience. At the end of it, I was a blithering, blathering wreck; I was in tears. Opera can do that, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Murphy. I have seen children come to the opera and be transformed. There is something about the ability to put music and drama together in such a powerful way that takes it above almost any other art form—but it is expensive. As I said at the beginning, we have to decide as a society whether we do or do not want opera. If we do, we have to find a way to pay for it. Perhaps looking at the tax system for donors is one way forward.
WNO has also worked with the Woodlands School, a specialist school for children with complex physical and sensory difficulties, covering Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall. It held a globally unique concert for PMLD students, doing what it does best, which is providing music for all. There is also the Creative Classrooms project that provides CPD for teachers across the academic year, focusing on creativity and exploring ways of embedding music in the classroom and how this links to the curriculum. These are just a handful of the types of projects that WNO leads offstage—this is not just about performances.
As a result of the financial cuts from Arts Council England, the Welsh National Opera finds itself struggling and has had to make substantial redundancies alongside a reduction in its activities, as was highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas. I am a big believer in widening opportunities for all and I fear that, without restoration of funding to WNO, there is a huge risk that opera will be guarded for only those that can afford it, both in terms of performers and those who watch in the audience.
In conversation recently with soprano Camilla Kerslake, who runs a foundation that offers opportunities for all children to enjoy music and support, I discovered that only 5% of people in British opera are from working class backgrounds, and most of them are from Wales. Wales is a success story in this regard and, when it comes to widening access to music and the arts, Wales has proven that it is possible. What would happen to this statistic without the WNO? Are this Government happy for a world-leading sector to be a preserve of the rich only? The statistics speak for themselves. Investment in arts in school enriches every aspect of a child, from academia to self-esteem. In the 1970s, the proportion of working-class people in opera was almost double, most likely due to heavier investment in music education in schools too.
I will conclude with some questions to the Government, which I hope will be addressed at the end of this debate. What assessment have His Majesty’s Government made of the impact that cuts to the WNO will have on the numbers of people from working-class backgrounds in opera? What discussions have taken place regarding the difficulties being faced at WNO and the risk of the sector disappearing altogether? I hope that a solution is forged and a sustainable plan put in place to secure WNO’s future and the enjoyment of future generations. Diolch yn fawr iawn am wrando.
He appeared as an urchin in a succession of great operas, culminating as one of Medea’s children, whom she was about to murder, in Bellini’s “Norma”. Having spent an entire act clutched rather painfully to the bosom of Maria Callas, he became a passionate and deeply knowledgeable opera lover for the rest of his life. It is possibly not a route for everyone, but it does show the value of gaining early experience of opera.
My second example comes from another opera APPG event last Tuesday in the Jubilee Room. This featured 20 children from St Joseph’s Catholic primary school in Chelsea, who provided the children’s chorus for ENO’s recent performances of “La Bohème”—which also featured my godson as Marcello. The school offers a highly impressive music curriculum, involving all its students from all backgrounds. I suspect that many of the children who sang the Act 2 chorus of street children with such thrilling confidence and enjoyment at the APPG event will retain a fondness for opera throughout their lives.
That shows the power of opera to engage children, and it certainly calls for a proper level of government investment in large-scale main-stage opera across the UK so that companies such as English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Opera North and the Royal Opera can continue their brilliant work with young people and enable many more of them to experience opera, to fall in love with opera and, in due course, to demand that their Government keep opera alive.
I end with two questions for the Minister. What are the Government doing to boost private investment in opera? How will they ensure that the vital outreach and education work of the major companies can continue and expand to ensure that all young people are able to experience, enjoy and value the unique rewards of opera?
However, in supporting such companies, we must not forget that they are not the whole story and that what they do is not everything that opera can be—that is despite what the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said; I hesitate to disagree with him, but I do. They are part, as I know they would readily acknowledge, of a complex, wide-ranging ecosystem, largely reliant not on long-term employees but on an army of freelancers. The vital innovation that will keep opera alive for the future happens across the whole of that ecosystem. All of it needs support in these very challenging times.
OperaUpClose is a good example. It is a small but ambitious company, where emerging composers, singers, conductors, directors, designers and technicians can test their ideas and learn their craft, and where established practitioners can do things differently. OperaUpClose actively chooses to perform in smaller spaces and places where opera is rarely available. It engages with local communities, inviting them to contribute directly to the creation of work. It runs important early career training opportunities and commissions work for very young audiences. If you have never been in a room with a bunch of very young children—three and four-year-olds—watching a man dressed as a teddy bear talking about not being able to get to sleep, then you have not heard “Peace At Last”, and you have not lived. All of this is delivered by a tiny team, with tiny budgets, competing for diminishing resources in an increasingly tough funding environment.
Yet there is nothing second best or reductive about what companies such as OperaUpClose are doing. High musical standards and production values are at the heart of their work; they extend the boundaries of what opera can be and the impact it can have. Doing that depends on a workforce that is almost all freelance, and as skilled and extraordinary as you will see in any grand opera house—and indeed many of them are the same people.
When we talk about supporting opera, we must talk about supporting the whole sector, at all scales and iterations; otherwise the whole sector will wither and ultimately die, as we have already been warned this evening. I believe that opera, no matter where or at what scale it is performed, is a living, breathing, evolving art form, with a unique ability, as we have also heard, to stir our most deep-seated emotions of joy, anguish, longing and acceptance. That is why it is important. I say to my noble friend the Minister when she comes to reply that opera speaks in many voices—let us make sure we are listening to all of them.
“confident that the WNO is in a strong place to succeed”.
Chris Bryant, Lisa Nandy and the rest of the DCMS team need urgently to look at this again. Given the current deficit of £2.7 million, the announced £775,000 will be swallowed up straightaway. What WNO needs most, immediately, is emergency funding, as we have heard.
As soprano Elizabeth Atherton, who has campaigned ceaselessly for Welsh National Opera, told me this week,
“if we want our national opera companies to succeed, then that comes with a financial commitment at a certain level in order to safeguard the sustainable future of the companies and to enable everyone to access performances without it becoming the realm of the wealthy”.
Bearing these arguments in mind, there is a strong case that the core running costs of our national opera companies should be removed from Arts Council England’s oversight and protected by government instead, in a similar way to how the national museums are protected. Companies that need millions of pounds to be viable should not be competing with smaller grass-roots organisations—that makes no sense whatever. Somewhat ironically, such grass-roots organisations include the hugely worthwhile Streetwise Opera, which works with the homeless and which is also struggling for funds, albeit at a very different level of funding.
I believe that we need ACE, but through the Let’s Create programme it is overloaded with the kinds of community projects that used to be in part funded by local government. ACE needs to be much better funded and able to concentrate on what ought to be its core function of funding artists and performers, which includes the kind of companies that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, referred to. All this funding is doable, considering that, within the scheme of things, arts funding is a drop in the ocean compared to the budgets of other departments. Ultimately, it is a question of political will.
Opera singers have rightly spoken out against Brexit—notably Sarah Connolly and, recently, Royal Opera star Rachel Nicholls. As reported by the Independent, she said that
“unless we are very careful, we are going to lose our entire classical music industry in this country”
through Brexit. Such a strong statement might raise a few eyebrows, until you realise how much of a European ecosystem classical music, including opera, is in its fundamental character. Rachel Nicholls has admitted that, despite being a star, she has not had a single contract in Germany since free movement ended. The problem is about not just touring but filling positions at short notice—now virtually impossible—and longer-term positions, which are so important for artists at every stage of their careers but which are now often advertised as being for only European passport holders.
I ask the Minister the same question I asked at Questions today. Without a commitment to rejoin the single market, how will the Government address these particular concerns? In some ways, these feel among the most intractable.