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ACE cuts funding to English National Opera*
ACE cuts funding
English National Opera
ISM’s Senior Policy & Campaigns Officer Naomi McCarthy looks at the rationale behind Arts Council England’s recent controversial funding cuts to its National Portfolio Organisations, and their potentially disastrous impact, particularly on ENO
For over 90 years English National Opera (ENO) has been working to ‘bring opera to everyone’ . The company was set up as Sadlers Wells Opera in 1931 by the philanthropist Lilian Baylis, who was passionate about providing audiences with the best opera at modest prices. Based at the London Coliseum since 1968 and renamed ENO in 1974, it is today one of the capital’s flagship opera companies and remains close to its founder’s vision, offering affordable and accessible productions, all sung in English. Its stage has helped to launch the careers of stars such as Dame Sarah Connolly, Allan Clayton and Nicky Spence, and its conductors have included Sir Colin Davis, Sir Charles Mackerras and Sir Mark Elder. It has also enlarged the opera canon with numerous commissions, perhaps the most famous being Britten’s Peter Grimes from 1945.
Yet despite this enormous contribution to the world of classical music, Arts Council England (ACE) has decided to strip ENO of its £12.5 million annual funding, removing it from the National Portfolio of arts organisations announced on 4 November. Other opera companies had their funding significantly reduced, including the Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera and Glyndebourne, but ENO was by far the worst affected. Instead, it was offered £17 million over the next three years on the condition that it agreed to relocate outside London, possibly to Manchester. ACE stated, ‘We require English National Opera to move to another part of England if they wish to continue to receive support from us.’
Image: ENO Iolanthe ENO Chorus and Cast
The decision is part of ACE’s Let’s Create initiative, a ten-year strategy set up in 2020 with the aim of using its budget to increase cultural investment across the country. The Let’s Create vision includes a Creative People and Places programme that targets areas of the country where cultural engagement is low. By supporting community projects they aim to increase engagement. Overall, the new National Portfolio will see investments outside London of £43.5 million per year. However, Let’s Create has been strongly criticised for moving too far away from artistic excellence in favour of inclusion and diversity. As a result, arts organisations renowned internationally for their high-quality performances are under threat simply for appearing too middle-class in their appeal. As Richard Morrison writes in The Times, ‘ACE has not so much shifted the goalposts as moved the entire game onto a different pitch, with different rules and inbuilt bias against previous winners’ . It is a disastrous trajectory for the country’s arts sector, which has long been one of our proudest exports. ACE was clearly pressured by government to move funding away from London. At a What Next? arts meeting on 9 November, the CEO of ACE Darren Henley revealed that in February his organisation was instructed by Nadine Dorries, at the time the Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), to ‘ move investment out of the capital’ . Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair of ACE, told The Times that they had to follow the government’s request to remove tens of millions of pounds from London-based arts organisations as part of the levelling-up agenda. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme he said, ‘the Arts Council was faced with some very difficult choices. We decided that we should not spread the misery across every company in the country … We should actually identify those companies that we thought could survive a withdrawal of their funding and in which we had faith that they had the ability to respond, and I think that’s the position that English National Opera is in.’
The announcement of the new National Portfolio was delayed at the last minute by ACE, apparently because it had to work around other government announcements and changes in government, but Henley stressed this had no implications on the funding decisions. However, according to ENO, it was given just 24-hours’ notice of the decision. It seems particularly perverse to cut ENO’s funding in the light of its work to appeal to new audiences and build its reach beyond London. In a statement released in response to the decision, ENO said: ‘Whether increasing diversity on and off stage, in the pit and in our audiences, supporting important national institutions such as the NHS in their COVID response with ENO Breathe and increasing our presence on broadcast and digital platforms … ENO has repeatedly been at the forefront of innovation for the entire opera industry.’ It also released statistics ‘An absolute travesty, in support of its efforts opera more accessible to make , including we are bemused and that 50% of its audience are baffled and shocked. ’ first-time are under opera goers 35 and over , 1 in half 7 of its audience came from outside
Stuart Murphy, ENO, CEO London in the 2021-22 season. ENO is also one of the cheapest cultural nights out in the city, with a £10 ticket price and free tickets for under-21s. ACE itself had praised the company for successfully broadening its appeal. ‘We were told we were absolutely on track,’ ENO’s CEO Stuart Murphy told The Guardian. There may be an argument for rebalancing funding between London and the regions and making opera more accessible to those living outside the capital. However, relocating a company as large and well established as ENO, which has over 600 skilled employees including musicians, technical and support staff, requires serious long-term planning, not the 20 weeks’ notice that ACE has given before its funding will be removed. The proposal that ENO could move to Manchester seems arbitrary and ill-conceived, given that Opera North already serves that region regularly and there is no
suitable venue for a permanent opera house in the city. Moreover, ENO states that no one in Manchester, including the Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, was consulted about the proposal. To cut ENO’s funding at such short notice, without proper consideration to its future or any consultation with ENO itself is extraordinary. Stuart Murphy described it as ‘ an absolute travesty,’ adding, ‘we are bemused and baffled and shocked.’
Similarly bizarre are ACE’s decisions to cut the Britten Sinfonia’s entire £406,000 grant, even though it is East Anglia’s finest orchestra and carries out a wide range of educational and outreach work, and to slash the grant to the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which tweeted its bewilderment at the news: ‘We are the only national organisation that champions folk music and dance for all – grass-roots amateurs, community groups, professionals, educators, young people, etc.’
Leading figures across the arts world have voiced their shock at the ENO decision. In a letter to The Times, Sir David Pountney, a former ENO director of productions, called it ‘brutal and irresponsible’, while Sue Spence of Askonas Holt artist agency described her ‘ sadness and frustration’ at the news, saying: ‘I have rarely seen such young and diverse audiences in any other venue.’ Operatic tenor Nicky Spence told the ISM: ‘I and countless other homegrown talents would simply not have a career if it weren’t for the training and opportunities ENO have afforded us. Making opera is hard work at the best of times and every department at ENO is so much more than the sum of their parts. The irreparable damage done to the cultural fabric of the UK in these recent cuts beggars belief and my heart breaks for all of the individuals who make opera happen.’ The Welsh bass-baritone Sir Bryn Terfel Jones has launched a petition calling for ACE to reinstate ENO’s funding immediately, which had been signed by nearly 59,000 people at the time of writing. To add your signature visit eno.org/about/love-eno. ENO is urging supporters to share the petition on social media channels using the hashtag #loveENO and to contact the Chair of the DCMS Select Committee Julian Knight, the DCMS Secretary of State Michelle Donelan and their own MP asking for the decision to be reversed.
In a statement released on Twitter, ENO wrote: ‘We want to work with DCMS and ACE to aid the levelling-up agenda but it has become clear to us that their proposal needs urgent revision so we can continue to be a world-class opera company in London and perform more regularly in all parts of the country, including Manchester.’
The ISM is running its own campaign focused on ACE’s cuts to the music sector. Visit ism.org/news/ ism-campaign-in-response-cuts-to-the-arts for more information and to find out how you can support the cause.
Images: ENO Productions
Photos: Clive Barda, Donald Cooper, Lloyd Winters, Tristram Kenton
