The people’s opera
ATHENA is fond of opera, especially when someone else is paying for her ticket, but even when she has to buy her own. It should be a source of pride for every Briton that the Royal Opera House (ROH) is one of the world’s pre-eminent venues. Opera is one of the most expensive forms of culture, requiring huge casts, vast spaces, full-size orchestras and elaborate sets and costumes.
The Royal Opera, moreover, is part of a complex ecology of companies around the country, which have proliferated in recent years. Athena is, for example, keen on the relatively new Grange Park Opera, based at Bamber Gascoigne’s house, West Horsley Place in Surrey, which is funded entirely by ticket sales and private philanthropy (My favourite painting, page 46).
Staging productions with the frequency of Covent Garden, however, means that the ROH requires a hefty State subsidy of some £24 million a year, even with top ticket prices that bring a tear to the most successful investment banker’s eye. Nearly half the tickets are £50 or less, however. Not only that, but the Royal Opera has a pretty well-embedded mission to popularise the artform through several outreach programmes aimed at demystifying what has long been regarded—certainly in the Anglo-saxon world—as perhaps the most elitist slice of cultural activity.
The latest and largest commitment to such outreach is made flesh in the admirable decision to open the building all day and provide the non-ticket-buying public with a wide range of events and amenities —in the words of the website: ‘Grab a coffee, enjoy a meal, join a workshop, glimpse backstage’—and to create large new spaces and facilities in which to do so.
This will inevitably make some cry ‘dumbing down’ (by the way, in a future piece, Athena wishes to explore the less discussed phenomenon of ‘dumbing up’, in which culture is vulgarised to appeal to the oligarchical classes). It is right that as ‘the people’ pay for a share of the Royal Opera’s activities, the people should be appealed to.
In only one respect does Athena find fault with the present state of the ROH. With her personal experience of the Parthenon, she knows that columniated white buildings don’t readily appeal to everyone. For that reason, she wishes that the new public spaces had been dressed in fancier clothes. Instead, they reflect all the bland luxury of an airport executive lounge.
Could it be that the panjandrums of high culture somehow feel that beauty is not as important to the culturally less sophisticated? Although not wanting to over-praise the 1935 decision to install chandeliers in the stations of the Moscow Metro, it’s an approach that, up to a point, does have its merits.
‘Could it be that the panjandrums of high culture feel beauty is not as important to the less sophisticated?