Opera

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

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

“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.