‘We bust a gut for fair ticket prices’
Alex Beard tells Rupert Christiansen about the constant, multimillion-pound pressures involved in running the Royal Opera House
Affable, unflappable and generally regarded as a good boss, Alex Beard, 55, has been chief executive of the Royal Opera House for five years. He has form: two previous decades were spent as Nicholas Serota’s right-hand moneyand-admin man at Tate.
Although he inherited a strongly managed and solvent organisation from Tony Hall (now director-general at the BBC), Beard walks a financial tightrope: a turnover of more than £120million, box-office sales running at 98 per cent capacity and a payroll of more than 1,000 staff results in a surplus of barely a couple of hundred thousand pounds. “We are vulnerable to a low exchange rate, and the smallest unexpected downturn can be disastrous. Battening down a budget is a constant headache,” Beard admits.
But he’s buoyant, nevertheless, and the announcement yesterday of a bold and innovative programme for next season (see right) suggests that morale and confidence at Covent Garden is high. Beard can also pat himself on the back over the great non-artistic success of his tenure to date: Open Up, a £50million scheme to rebuild the ROH’S ancillary studio theatre, the Linbury, and extend the foyers to improve daytime access.
With no more than the overruns and engineering hitches inevitably
attendant on such a complex project, the mission is completed. “The builders have gone and we’re beginning to find our way round the new facilities,” says Beard. “It’s proving an enjoyable learning process.” If he is serious about the democratising aspirations of “opening up”, he might like to consider fine-tuning the awkward disabled access, reforming the prissy, pricey catering, and restoring the provision of free brochures detailing the future programme. (“We have to save money” is the lame excuse for the latter.)
Audience development is a high priority. As another of his predecessors, Genista Mcintosh, once put it: “We don’t need more people here; we need different people.” Although the ROH may be full every night, it tends to be the same crowd, drawn from a narrow demographic that leaves the Government uneasy. But one can’t accuse the management of not trying to extend the scope: there are heavily subsidised schools’ matinees, a supporters’ club for the under-25s with 29,000 members, and free tickets for those in care homes provided by the Gavron Gold charity. There are also a dozen nationwide HD broadcasts to cinemas each season, drawing audiences of more than 400,000.
But the fact remains that great opera and ballet can never come cheap, and demand will always vastly exceed supply for knockout productions such as the recent La forza del destino.
“We bust a gut trying to ensure a fair distribution at fair prices for that,” Beard says, “and it made me furious that Viagogo [an online agency for reselling premium tickets] was advertising tickets for thousands of pounds more than their face value. We couldn’t do anything legally, but I’m glad to say that the Competition and Markets Authority has now stepped in to stop this practice.”
The ROH receives £25million a year from the taxpayer via Arts Council England. The money comes with a slew of conditions addressing broader social needs – are they restrictive? “Well, the conditions are nothing new,” Beard says. “I used to work for the Arts Council in the Eighties, and in those days there were ropes rather than strings attached. We aren’t being asked to do anything that we don’t want to do anyway, particularly in relation to arts provision in schools. So I would say that our relationship with ACE is pretty good, even though the pressures of funding remain immense and are unlikely to let up.” What fills the gap is money from the private sector. The ROH employs 40 people in the hunt for this, and they raised funds for Open Up without a penny from the Treasury.
The éclat of associating one’s name with a production at Covent Garden’s may be catnip to extrovert plutocrats, of course, but in the light of ethical worries over the Sackler Trust, the house is observing strict guidelines as to whose money should be accepted. “Our policy is transparent,” Beard insists. The ROH had its fingers burned before: the Cuban-american financier Alberto Vilar pledged millions he never delivered in order to see his name up in Covent Garden’s lights, and was then convicted of fraud in 2008.
Another tricky issue relates to the music director, Antonio Pappano. He has been at Covent Garden since 2001 and has done a magnificent job: he’s a superb musician, an astoundingly versatile conductor, and great singers adore him. He wields enormous power over artistic decisions, and if he leaves when his present contract expires in 2023, he will have been in the post for more than 20 years. Who is in the driving seat here? “Tony says no to me, and I say no to Tony,” is Beard’s gnomic response to this question.
For what is only a part-time commitment, Pappano is rewarded with a retainer of £115,000 and a performance fee of £24,000, amounting in 2016-17 to nearly £800,000 – more than the Prime Minister and the heads of the NHS and Civil Service put together.
Beard insists that the ROH should be regarded as a national public institution, “conceived at the same time as the NHS”, but he doesn’t see any problem with this. “Music director is not a job for life, but Tony is still young and he has many projects he wants to pursue. Compared to his peers, his fee is reasonable.” It is true that his market value is high – he could have any job he wanted in opera – but it will still seem shockingly excessive to most people.
Another issue where the financial stakes are high is the Appeal Court ruling last month in favour of the viola player, Christopher Goldscheider, who sued the ROH after rehearsals for Wagner’s Die Walküre left him with a form of impaired hearing known as acoustic shock syndrome. Substantial damages will be paid by the ROH’S insurers, but the implications of the judgment are unclear. “This is the first case of acoustic shock in a musical context – previously it had only occurred in call centres. What we really dreaded was a court instruction that orchestral players should wear protective earmuffs – that would have spelt the end. But the judge was clear that the precautions we are now taking to monitor noise levels and promote safe practices are the right ones. What effect this will have on our insurance policy, I don’t at this stage know.”
Beard is a romantic about the art forms he nurtures, and, for all the challenges the job presents, he’s not complaining. “This is a place of very special experiences – for me as well as the audience. One day I’m up close to a ballet rehearsal; the next day I’m at a schools’ matinee cheering its head off at La traviata. So I consider myself a very lucky man indeed.”
‘We are vulnerable to a low exchange rate, and the smallest unexpected downturn can be disastrous’