DISASTER OF THE DECADE

indicators. The tightly managed and well-performing Royal Opera House, with its special cachet of glamour, has remained steadily if narrowly in the black, but the other national companies have struggled and contracted under the pressure. Even when the purse strings on government spending are finally loosened, money won’t flow back opera’s way, and maintaining year-round companies with a full roster of staff is going to become less and less feasible.

A new model has already emerged, however, in the form of the boom in summer country-house festivals, taking their cue from Glyndebourne.

Let’s be clear: this is not ideal. Organisations such as Garsington, Grange Park, the Grange and Longborough, alongside smaller concerns such as Bampton Classical Opera, Dorset

Opera and Iford Arts, can afford only to hire parttime staff at generally lower rates than the subsidised companies, and the premium prices they charge for tickets effectively exclude most of the population.

But aside from their advantageous tax status as charitable trusts, they make no call on the Exchequer while satisfying a demand for deluxe trappings, complete with picnic or dinner in a bucolic environment.

Leaving aside the harmless snobbery of this, the work presented is often of very high quality and adventurously programmed too. An interesting variant is that of the less expensive Opera Holland Park that (thanks to special help from its wealthy local council) offers an al fresco urban setting, a pleasantly informal atmosphere, and admirable artistic achievement.

At the global end of the scale, a chronic shortage of star power

ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA’S DECLINE

The company’s sorry saga is a tale of bad management and many artistic disappointments. doesn’t help the box office. There may be as many wonderful singers as there ever were – Joyce DiDonato, Nina Stemme, Elina Garanca, Juan Diego Flórez, to name but four – but only Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann can fill a major house on the strength of their names alone, and even they don’t have much traction outside the core fan base. At least the deplorable vogue for “popera”, in which third-raters factitiously claimed to bring opera to the people by bellowing through a few famous arias on talent shows, seems to have evaporated.

But in Britain at least there is no want of creative energy. The adage that modern music is just a horrible screechy racket no longer holds, and there has been encouraging uptake for plenty of original and engaging new work. Never mind the constant dearth of money or the mockery directed

There is no shortage of wonderful singers, but few have the star power to fill a house

COUNTRY HOUSE CAPER Barrie Kosky’s 2015 Saul at Glyndebourne