Opera

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, for the opportunity to debate the problems facing the opera sector. I agree with much that has been said. The noble Lord has come up with the next step following this debate—he spoke of the need for a DCMS opera working group and a national opera service. There is potential in those suggestions.

Mention has been made of Germany, which is correct, but there, local government has a key role in the offering of opera, the management of premises and opera companies, and so on. We have a very different structure. I have noted the challenges that we have heard across the Chamber about who makes what decisions, why and whether they are divorced from the impact of their decisions on communities. As we have heard, reductions in funding are having an impact. There are fewer performances and rising concerns about viability. Outside London, there are serious problems with touring opera to smaller places. Opera is more costly. It is difficult to maintain orchestras, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. There are now only two—one outside of London. The number of productions is declining. There are the pressures on freelancers and the impact of Brexit, and there is the importance of supporting the whole sector.

I will take a slightly different angle in what I am about to say. I wanted to speak in this debate because I believe that opera can build audiences. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, suggested earlier that this needs to happen. The noble Baroness, Lady Harman, talked about access, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, talked about opportunity being everything, and absolutely it is. However, as we know, two-thirds of income for performances outside London is dependent on grants. I support Arts Council England’s aim to broaden access to cultural opportunities across England. That is right as an ambition, but action can build audiences. I understand that the 2022 announcement of funding has been controversial. In terms of English National Opera, it was never clear to me how ENO would work in the same broad geographical area as Opera North, which is my local opera company even though it is based 90 miles away from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

I noticed a reference in the resolution of ENO’s understandable and correct wish to maintain a London presence as well as its Manchester base: that ENO will perform in the “city region”—that is, Greater Manchester. I hope and had assumed that ENO would have a plan to deliver performances outside that city region—in Lancashire and Cumbria, for example. I have also been hoping that the north-east of England could benefit, directly or indirectly, from the arrival of ENO in the north of England, through more opera being performed and more outreach activity achieved.

I am going to count Gilbert and Sullivan as mainstream opera—we might have a debate on whether it is, but for many people, it is mainstream. A few weeks ago, the programme notes by Opera North for its impressive revival this year of “Ruddigore” pointed out that there are some 2,000 amateur musical societies across the country, with 100 dedicated solely to Gilbert and Sullivan. As someone who developed a love of opera through Gilbert and Sullivan, I understand the importance of that route. I believe that there is untapped demand for opera, and it has to be tapped. I recall that when I chaired the Theatre Royal trust in Newcastle there were frequent discussions about our poor audience for some operas. A difficulty was that we had limited performance availability. Arts Council England was funding new works, rightly, but they then had to be performed, taking some of those slots. This meant that some of the more popular operas could not be performed. The solution would have been more performance dates, but those could not be funded. Yet I believe that there is a latent demand.

My evidence is this. On 24 November, at the Glasshouse International Centre for Music at Gateshead, we heard Sir Michael Tippett’s “A Child of Our Time”. There were 300 performers, with international soloists; there were guest members of the chorus of Royal Northern Sinfonia, with over 200 singers, mostly locally based; there were guest members of the orchestra—amateurs alongside the professional musicians. The standard was very high indeed and the audience was large. So audiences for work such as this can be transferred to opera. The Arts Council needs to provide leadership effectively on this, and it needs others to help manage that process, but the suggestion made at the very start by the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, might get us part-way down the road of achieving that.