When Arts Council England made its funding announcement earlier this month, the headlines were all about the withdrawal of funding (pending negotiation) from English National Opera. But ENO wasn’t the only opera company targeted: Welsh National Opera’s annual funding was cut by £2.2 million, over a third of their previous grant and the second largest cut of anyone still in the portfolio. The Council’s press statements made no mention of the WNO cut, so I was keen to speak to Aidan Lang, the company's General Director, to understand more. But there was a snag: Lang is as much in the dark as any of the rest of us.
“We are none the wiser, absolutely none. There’s been no explanation given other than a pleading that it’s not an opera thing, it’s about levelling up or spreading culture and creativity to the regions. But that’s exactly what we do: within England, we perform in seven different cities. We just don’t get it. And before, when we asked ‘what is the strategy for opera’, no answer was forthcoming. We are completely in the dark as to the rationale for this decision. It makes no sense whatsoever.”
Asking Arts Council England’s regional offices has shed no further light. “We’ve been moved from the West Midlands Office to the South West; we’ve had meetings with the staff there and the director of music and we’re still none the wiser. The thing is, the assessment of our application was glowing. If you read the report, the recommendation was for the full amount that we had requested – which was a standstill, so we weren’t being greedy. And we were already projecting a change in our delivery model for year three to promote audience growth.”
In the past, WNO’s public funding was approximately 60% from Arts Council England and 40% from Arts Council Wales. “It’s a partnership,” Lang explains. “What it means is that both countries get the benefits of a full time opera company, but share the cost. It means that ACE get all the benefits of what we do, including all the engagement programmes we undertake in England, for around 60% of the cost it would be if we were sited over the border in, say, Bristol. So we represent tremendous value. Now, over the next three years, we are inevitably going to have to phase in a reduction in touring weeks in England – we’ve been told that is expected of us. We have already had to announce the loss of Liverpool this season, which we had to do quickly as the week is already on sale, and sales would be likely to build in the run-up to Christmas. In future, we will almost inevitably have to drop at least one title per season as well.”
“Down the track,” Lang continues, “there will be knock on effects of diminishing the output when you have a full time company of orchestral players, chorus and technicians. We are by far and away the major arts employer in Wales; the drip-on effect is that once the company begins to reduce its presence and its scope, work opportunities diminish and a career in the arts becomes a less attractive proposition. In other words, Wales will also suffer from this funding cut, as it has the potential to threaten the livelihoods of a full-time company who largely live and work in Cardiff. But as far as we can see, there was no consultation whatsoever between ACE and Arts Council Wales. So this actually amounts to a cut imposed by London on the flagship arts organisation of a devolved nation.”
What makes the situation particularly disappointing is that WNO has been forging ahead this season, both artistically and in terms of audience development. In September, when I discussed Lang’s plans for WNO, he told me that success in bringing in younger audiences was the achievement he was most proud of in his previous role, as General Director of Seattle Opera. “We shifted the age demographic hugely. From time immemorial, the under 50 component of the Seattle Opera audience was 25%. We lifted that from 25 to 49% in two years; I’m sure they tipped 50% in year I left. How did that happen? I’d love to say it was my marvellous programme, but no, it was something more interesting than that.”
“We looked at the city to see what makes it tick,” Lang continues, “and it seemed to be a city of values and ideas, a place with a mayor who was the first to ask the arts to take a lead on matters of diversity, with a clear directive to the arts community to say ‘we want our city to have equity, and you as presenters of ideas can really help me achieve the city’s objectives’. And that really gave us pause for thought, because opera is pregnant with ideas. We linked the work we were doing to contemporary issues, not by distorting the production to hammer home a point but by building a range of activities around it.”