Few living british composers are as prominent as Michael Berkeley. He has an established body of work stretching back over more than 30 years, is a high-profile public figure in broadcasting and the arts and—as the son of Lennox Berkeley and godson of Benjamin Britten—is one of the bluebloods of English music.
Even fewer British writers are as well known as Ian McEwan. He too has been writing since the 1970s, is one of Britain's most highly regarded novelists, is a Booker prize-winner and is, like Berkeley, one of Britain's significant public intellectuals.
So when two such figures, each at the height of his powers, work together to create a new opera for the first time—they also collaborated on the 1982 oratorio Or Shall We Die?—you might think that it would be easy to market; that funders, corporations and foundations would be falling over themselves to be associated with it.
You would be wrong. At the end of this month, the Berkeley-McEwan opera—a full-length chamber piece titled For You, with six soloists and an orchestra of 14 players, described by those who claim to be in the know as a lyrical mystery about sexual jealousy and creative prowess—will indeed get its world premiere. But its beginning is perhaps also its end, because For You is a leap in the dark. Though not outrageously expensive as operas go, it cannot cover its costs, and it could endanger the future of the unique company that commissioned it (see below). The saga of For You poses a stark question about the way Britain does contemporary opera.
All opera requires time and money to stage. New operas take more time, though not necessarily more money. They have to be commissioned, written, perhaps tried out in workshops, perhaps revised, then finally produced, rehearsed and performed. None of this is cheap. At the top of the range, Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, which opened at Covent Garden on 15th April, cost the (heavily subsidised) Royal Opera around £750,000.
The budget for creating and touring For You this year is £400,000. Though not all the detailed figures are published—Berkeley's and McEwan's fees, for instance—insiders are adamant that it is a tightly financed project. "Not exceptional" is how MTW's Michael McCarthy puts it.
But significant public money has gone into For You. MTW's core operation is supported by Arts Council Wales, while Arts Council England is backing a large part of the touring side. Trusts and foundations have also donated more than a quarter of the money for the project.
Even so, with the premiere at Brecon's Theatr Brycheiniog on 31st May, MTW is still £50,000 under budget for what, by any standards, is a major musical theatre project. It may not seem like a big sum, but with arts companies under such scrutiny, a loss such as this makes MTW very vulnerable in the coming years. McCarthy, who has spent much of the past two years trying to finance the project, says that attracting corporate investment for For You has been "incredibly difficult." And he is convinced he is up against both a cultural and structural problem.
He is surely right. A lot of contemporary opera may struggle to win the public's hearts, but it is not an unmitigated story of failure. There have been successes too—by Birtwistle, Adès, Weir and Dove in this country, perhaps now to be joined by Berkeley and George Benjamin, whose Into the Little Hill had its British premiere in Liverpool in April. The truth is that we have a lot of good composers, but they are not getting enough chances and support.
Regenerating opera as a living form in the language of the audience is a necessary task. Britten nearly managed it half a century ago, but the effort has faltered since then. Yet opera cannot consistently be condemned for being an art form of the past and then simultaneously condemned to remain one. New opera is as integral to the operatic art form as new writing, new dance, new theatre and new visual arts are to theirs. The challenge of replenishing the repertoire raises big artistic issues as well as financial ones. But the question has to be how to get it right, not whether to do it at all.
All British opera companies have some degree of commitment, though not always a consistent one, to new opera. But the co-ordination between companies, both large and small, is overwhelmingly passive (the avoidance of clashes) and not active (investing, promoting and encouraging), as it should be. Neither the opera world nor the arts councils have a strategy for promoting contemporary opera, and it is dismaying that there is no public fund for it. Without strategy there is no profile, and without profile there is not enough investment. At the moment we have a vicious circle, which means that an important work like For You struggles to see the light of day. It is high time that British opera got off its collective backside and created a virtuous circle instead.
