Food for the soul

I have vivid memories of entering the operatic mainstream as a staff director at English National Opera (ENO) at the tail end of the last recession. After a major surge in arts funding from business sponsorship, there were many Cassandras forecasting a collapse. Heart-warmingly, what actually happened was a change of direction: large-scale business sponsorship was replaced or eclipsed by individual donations, which have proved to be a major growth area for many of our opera companies. While our six national companies (Royal Opera, ENO, Glyndebourne, Welsh National Opera, Opera North and Scottish Opera) have all been running for a number of decades, they represent only a fraction of the sector. Graham Devlin’s 1992 report, ‘The Beggar’s Opera,’ showed 37 opera companies in the UK. The Opera and Music Theatre Forum (OMTF) has just commissioned a new piece of research from Graham Devlin, which has already identified at least 200 opera companies functioning today – a growth of more than 500%. While the number of companies receiving regular funding from Arts Council England (ACE) and has shrunk (eight now, compared with more than 12 in the early 1990s) the sector has been booming.
Turn of the screw
One new strand is the country-house style opera, where companies formed in the shadow of Glyndebourne market opera as a luxury to be dressed up for, picnicked at and enjoyed by the wealthy. These new companies range from the conspicuously successful Grange Park, Garsington and Nevill Holt, through smaller-scale or specialist companies like Iford, Longborough or Bampton, to the smaller more idiosyncratic companies such as Stanley Hall or Almaviva Opera. As a decidedly post-Thatcher phenomenon very much dependent on the private patronage of the rich, these are vulnerable to credit-crunch collywobbles. There is already evidence that country-house opera is not selling as well this summer as previously, and Glyndebourne recently cancelled a planned gala. It’s hard not to see the companies built on private and commercial fortunes as the most vulnerable in a recession. They are more dependent and therefore more vulnerable than any other art form.
A second growth area is youth, children’s, community and educational opera. All our major national companies have expanded hugely in this area, while a number of independent educational companies have come and either gone or merged. The effect of the recession is very much harder to predict, as the funding portfolios of each company are diverse: Birmingham Opera Company is almost exclusively funded by subsidy, while W11 Opera, performed by 9–18 year-olds, draws its income almost completely from private sources. Maybe as a late recompense for the collapse of proper musical training in schools, many initiatives such as Creative Partnerships and Youth Music fund this kind of work, and though this will no doubt be knocked by government
cut-backs, it’s hard to imagine that it will disappear altogether.

The impresario
A third major growth area is the more mainstream commercial opera. Impresarios  such as Ellen Kent or Peter Mulloy, with his  Carl Rosa Opera company, have been touring performances delivered economically with great commercial success. In a sense, Ellen Kent is already a casualty of the recession: her operation was made possible by the economic quirk of exchange rates and the relative cheapness of East European labour and, now that rates are less favourable  and this labour less cheap, she has altered her operations. It’s hard to predict how the recession will affect the largely commercial companies. I’d like to think that in times of trouble audiences will need food for their souls, and are likely to seek this at our performances.
The fourth major growth area is the artist-driven company delivering new, innovative or high-quality ‘art’ opera. While a few survive from the early 90s (Music Theatre Wales and Opera Circus), key companies from then have simply disappeared (Opera Factory and Mecklenburgh Opera). These have been superseded by a new roster of companies including my own Tête à Tête, as well as an expanding new roster of very young companies fostered by the Tête à Tête and Arcola Festivals, which have thrown up maybe 60 new companies over the last two years. This is another area ventured into by our national companies through initiatives such as Opera North Projects, ROH2 and ENO at the Young Vic. This scene changes so rapidly and functions so variously, it’s pretty much impossible to generalise about the economics – the more established companies survive on a mixture of partnerships, trusts and foundations, private sponsorship and subsidy. The incomes here have fluctuated so wildly over the years, due to factors such as unpredictable ACE policies, that it’s unlikely the recession will make a particular difference. The bottom line here is that operations founded on the energy of determined artistic drivers will rise and fall according to that determination, more than political, economic and social factors. This gives the independents the edge over the more management-heavy national companies. If a director, conductor or singer is genuinely on fire to make a piece, it will happen.
Sea interludes
Horror stories like New York City Opera getting to the end of its reserves and teetering on the edge of collapse stem from opera’s almost total dependence on private patronage throughout the USA. Our colleagues across much of Europe, on the other hand, depend almost entirely on subsidy and will be looking at the mid- to long-term with some anxiety as they wonder how cash-strapped governments will distribute their resources. In Italy, half the country’s opera houses may be shut by the beginning of next year. We are very lucky in the UK that the majority of our operations have a very broad-based portfolio of funders. Nevertheless, most trusts and foundations have depleted endowments and are drawing in their horns. High net worth individuals are in a similar position (though there is an argument that smaller donors may actually have a higher disposable income thanks to a hesitancy about investing combined with an urge to economise). ACE has announced a fund for emergency help to recession-hit companies, and its £75,000 minimum signals a focus on established existing clients, which is bleak for the smaller- to medium-sized companies hoping for project grants from what is left.
So a bleak few years ahead all round and careful planning would seem to be the order of the day. I can’t help staying optimistic, though, because in times of hardship people need the food for the soul that opera provides the most. I can’t help remembering what happened in the early 1990s when I joined ENO, and I suspect that there will be solutions from the most surprising and unforeseen quarters. The best we can do is to remain cheerful, ambitious, creative and open.