These are not happy times for what used to be called, without derogation, high culture. Following its recent spending review, the government decided to restore the 17.5 per cent snipped off the Arts Council's budget since the early 1990s, but even this welcome measure will not bring back the old confidence-the damage runs too deep. Over the past 20 years, the supremacy of the entire western European, post-Renaissance tradition has been tarnished, if not trashed. A minority of old-school humanists may worry about "dumbing down," but their homilies have come too late, because the vandals have already knocked down the gates. Market forces-the morality of Hollywood-push artists and audiences ever deeper into the mire of the violent, the pornographic or the ephemeral. The Keynesian principle of state subsidy can no longer be relied upon to countervail such influences. Meanwhile, the debate has been fatally delimited to a pair of slippery and easily caricatured terms: "Elitism"-championed in Bloomsbury salons, where they chatter about "standards" and "classics" and "civilisation" as though they were absolutes; versus "accessibility"-the watchword of that happy level playing-field where Keats cavorts with Bob Dylan and everybody has a right to self-expression.
Opera is particularly vulnerable to such an intellectual climate. No other art form has such strong associations with the ancien regime, with hierarchy and the pleasure of the ruling class; no other art form can seem more archaic and encoded. The saga of the Royal Opera House's collapse is symbolic of this-an episode in the broader decline of the pin-stripe establishment toff. Nobody seems concerned to judge the place by the yardstick of the quality of the work it presents; it is perceived rather as a private club run for the rich by the rich, at the expense of the poor taxpayer. The Royal Opera House certainly has charges to answer. What is deplorable, however, is the way that opera itself has been judged guilty by association, to the point that the very word has come to stink of privilege and corruption.
So how can opera defend itself? How can it escape the endless slanging match between the elitist and the accessible factions? I am not sure that it can. The most successful opera company in Britain is the Glyndebourne Festival, which produces work of the highest standard without the oxygen of public subsidy, sells all its tickets and stays in the black. But it manages this only by remaining "elitist"-unlike the publicly-owned Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne really is a private club, which allows the public to buy the tickets that its members don't want. Fortunately, the public like this idea: Glyndebourne's primary commercial asset is not its superb performances of Janacek and Birtwistle but the notion that it is as exclusive as the Royal Enclosure at Ascot-without the evening dress and the interval picnics, its auditorium would be empty.
Beyond Glyndebourne, there is a burgeoning demand for such "posh" summer evening country-house affairs, most of them of inferior quality. Most people can only tolerate opera if it is gift-wrapped and glamorous; there is no escaping the melancholy truth that counter-efforts by the "accessible" lobby to democratise opera and present it unadorned by a glass of champagne meet with an apathetic response. Opera on television rates embarrassingly low viewing figures. Opera Factory, a company performing in rough and raunchy style, aimed at young audiences, shut up shop last year for lack of support. As an opera critic, I cannot count the number of times I have sat in cold provincial theatres on wet Thursday nights, reviewing valiant Arts Council-sponsored operatic events, otherwise witnessed by nobody except a handful of bemused senior citizens and a mutinous school party.
The only other popular demand for opera comes from audiences with no taste for its theatrical dimension, but happy enough to hear its greatest hits in concert. The Three Tenors, Lesley Garrett, Raymond Gubbay's "gala" programmes at the Barbican-all these sell to middle-aged and elderly folk who like familiar tunes. Not for them the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk or dramma per la musica: what they want is a fat Italian tenor busting his gut for Nessun dorma or two pretty sopranos carolling the one from the British Airways ads-and why shouldn't they have them?
Within the opera business, however, the refusal to admit such home truths has created an atmosphere of anxiety and confusion. Everyone is trying to make opera easy. Celebrity fans like Harry Enfield and Rory Bremner jump up and down in the media, trying to engage the interest of the 20-and 30-somethings. The opera companies' own education departments probably do as much harm as good with their noble but misguided efforts to take opera into schools and persuade kids that Mozart and Verdi are cool. The Saatchi agency conjures up elaborate and expensive campaigns to smarten opera's image, but there is no evidence that such initiatives make more than a marginal difference at the box office.
The unsentimental conclusion is this. Opera should stop being frightened of the "elitist" label and stop over-selling itself. "Opera for All," "the People's Opera": such desperate slogans have no impact or meaning. Hard though one may try, opera just doesn't come easy. In this country-and indeed everywhere else, if you discount the myths about the Verdi-loving Italian proletariat -it has never been more than a minority taste, predominantly confined to musically educated, sophisticated, older people, and there is no cause to hope that it can ever be inflated into a form of mass entertainment-any more than real tennis can ever hope to be a mainstream sport.
The best way of wooing younger audiences is not to preach "accessibility" at them, but to bring down seat prices to the level of the cinema. A pipe dream, I fear. Given the chancellor's refusal to improve the tax incentives on charitable donations to the arts (which is what sustains, albeit shakily, opera companies in the US), this can only be done through a high level of public subsidy which goes dead against the grain of present economic thinking. Attempts to argue that the Treasury receives all its money back through national insurance, VAT and so forth don't seem to cut much ice with Treasury mandarins.
However you look at it, whoever pays for it, opera is going to be very expensive for someone along the line. Maybe the nation will ultimately get the best value for its money if it accepts that-like some purely academic university department-an opera house is a centre of excellence and opera a rarified business of which only a few will understand the true worth.
