I’m in Norway, a music festival in Sandefjord, a former centre of the whale trade. The breakfast room is full of the bric-à-brac of this defunct industry. Call me Ishmael.
It’s in this unlikely place that, having lodged my postal vote, I will await the fall of this godforsaken government. By the time you read this, the result will be known. We in the weird world of classical music are dreaming of a new dispensation. The current—at time of writing—leader of the opposition attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama as a teenager, playing piano and flute; the shadow secretary of state for culture is a former orchestral cellist; and, most significantly for me, her number two played Macheath in my university production of The Threepenny Opera.
As the government changes, the mood will change. We remember the feeling of abandonment during the Johnson administration—the crass philistinism of that Covid-era ad with the picture of a ballet dancer and the accompanying slogan “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber”. The Brexit agreement negotiated by the hapless David Frost sold the performing arts down the river. Some repairs at the margins will, one hopes, be made. While the Labour party seems doggedly committed to no shift on freedom of movement in general, it does offer some hope on helping performers to work in the EU. The 90-day rule (no more than 90 days in any 180-day period in the Schengen area) is complex and disastrous for many musicians, individuals and orchestras alike.
Classical music is not, despite all the jeremiads, dead. I’ve just been in Aldeburgh, where the festival, in its last season led by the newly knighted Roger Wright, is seeing full houses for innovative programming, and an expansive vision which reaches into the local community and strengthens international connections. The previous week, I went to a piano recital by Yuja Wang at the Festival Hall in London. That nearly 3,000-seater venue was packed to the rafters for an uncompromising programme: Samuel Barber’s Sonata, preludes and fugues by Shostakovich in the first half; Chopin Ballades in the second. Ten or eleven encores. This was serious stuff, but it was also fun and full of the life force that is at the heart of music-making.
But there is a malaise affecting classical music in the UK that goes beyond years of government neglect and penny-pinching. Institutionally, one can point to the Arts Council which, under ministerial instruction, has been idly destroying the delicate ecosystem that has allowed British music to enrich so many lives at home and punch above its weight on the world stage.
There is a malaise affecting classical music in the UK
Having just been in Suffolk, I might mention first the withdrawal of funding from the Britten Sinfonia, an ensemble I’ve worked with across the world. They are a model for combining excellence—playing and programming of brilliance and imagination—and regional outreach in East Anglia. Yet the Arts Council pulled the plug. They’ll survive, but it will be difficult.
I’ve been working with the English National Opera since I took part as a child in a production of Massenet’s Werther in 1977. It was a great moment when what had started out as the Sadlers Wells Opera was reborn as the ENO and made its home in one of the iconic London theatres, the Coliseum. It gave the capital two companies, reflecting both sides of the operatic coin. While Covent Garden was a global player, bringing the greatest singers in the world to London, the democratic Coli nurtured local talent and sang in English, reaching out to a wider audience. “Opera for all,” they called it, and as a child it seemed to me that the red plush of the ROH seats and the serviceable blue of the Coli down the road meant that all bases were covered. Outside the capital, Opera North followed, along with Glyndebourne Touring and the other national companies. Alongside this, the BBC’s mission was to bring these “elite” arts to a non-elite audience. Channel 4 followed suit.
The Arts Council was founded by John Maynard Keynes around the same time as the NHS, and it spoke the same noble language. Medicine should be available to all, regardless of means; and the summits of the arts are both a civic entitlement and a civic responsibility. The arts are precious; we hold them in trust for the future, recreating them generation by generation. Nowadays, that also means taking art into the regions, nurturing art in the regions, recognising the ethnic diversity of the nation at large. It shouldn’t mean losing sight of the underlying aim, or of the importance of sustaining centres of excellence. If genius is, as Carlyle had it, the infinite capacity to take pains, then it requires patient support or it will atrophy. Increased access to box-ticking mediocrity cannot be our goal, surely.
We need to celebrate what is actually an extraordinary moment in our musical history. The visual arts in the UK have been celebrated no end in recent years. But it was Sadlers Wells that saw the premiere of the first great British opera, Britten’s Peter Grimes, played all over the world to this day. A couple of months ago, I was at the Opera Bastille for the Parisian premiere of Thomas Adès’s Exterminating Angel. Full house, press sensation. British opera is conquering the world. The Arts Council seems not to have noticed.
