Opinion: Incompetence or malice? Arts Council England’s new report on opera

In March 2024, Arts Council England published their report Let’s Create: Opera and Music Theatre Analysis, which attracted much criticism from all sides of the political spectrum: ACE were accused of being “patronising and snide”, of having “declared war on opera and excellence”, and were enjoined to “get shot of bogus criteria” and “one-size-fits-all assessment”.

The purpose of this article isn’t to defend opera from an ACE assault. Rather, it is to question their competence in the commissioning and publication of this report. In short: whether or not you are inclined to agree or disagree with the many different things it says, this is a very bad document, so bad as to strongly suggest that an organisation that can publish such a report is unfit for purpose. Even the commissioning process seems to demonstrate incompetence.

The report’s creators appear to have gathered a sensible amount of data from a reasonable set of sources. That, however, is just about the only positive comment I can make, in contrast to the pile of negatives.

The report’s introduction gives no evidence of a clear purpose

The introduction gives the purpose as “to provide an accurate account of what is currently known about the professional opera and music theatre sector in England”, but then says that “this is not a comprehensive study of the sector and its activities”. It does not mention any items on which the authors were expected to provide opinions – and yet opinions form a major part of the text that follows.

The report was commissioned after key decisions had been made rather than before

ACE’s Investment Programme for 2023–26 was announced in November 2022, including the cuts which caused major damage to opera availability in cities outside London.

ACE announced that they would commission the report in January 2023 – in other words, researching the sector after the cuts had been made rather than before.

The new basis of working between ACE and English National Opera was announced in July 2023.

The report appeared in March 2024 – long after the key decisions that this kind of study should have informed.

Lacking clear purpose, the report appears to be a selection of data and opinions gathered with no obvious structure or narrative flow

The headings in the report are Production, Financial Models, Talent development and retention, Presentation, Distribution, Opera and Music Theatre as a sector. This is a jumble. How can one describe Production and Presentation independently? Why are the sections on “Frequency, churn and loyalty memberships” and “the impact of Covid-19 and the cost of living within “Presentation” and not “Financial Models”?

The report freely mixes data with unsupported assertions and opinions with no clear sense of what data has informed which assertions

Shortly after tabular data from Operabase is the statement that “What repertoire is prioritised, and how repertoire is interpreted and presented for contemporary audiences, is affected by the prevalence of classical music paradigms in opera and music theatre”. What does this mean, who says so and why is it there? Then we read “Some contributors to this study feel that the stories which opera and music theatre tells are failing to connect fully with contemporary society” or “Looking at the evidence and responses from contributors, England has a committed opera and music theatre sector”. Who are these contributors? Why should we believe them?

The report talks about “When we ran interviews and focus groups” - but the results of interviews and focus groups are never presented.

The report does not include a summary of conclusions or recommendations, in anything other than the most general terms.

I could pick almost any of the conclusions, but here is a typical extract, the last paragraph of the conclusion about business models:

Overall, there is an inescapable tension between current available income streams for opera and music theatre, the current balance of organisations and activities in the sector and the ambitions which the sector expresses to do the things it would like to do, and to engage with communities in the way it would like to, including where these fit closely with the Outcomes in Let’s Create. This extends to the needs and expectations of the sector in relation to public funding, whether from Arts Council England, local authorities, or other public sources.

I defy anyone to give me any concrete way in which this statement can inform policy.

And finally, the 14-page “Executive summary” appears to be an arbitrary selection of items from the full report rather than actually summarising anything.

The report seems divorced from mood in the industry

At the Opera Europa Spring Conference in Vienna this month, Sir David Pountney delivered a blistering keynote which criticised the report in withering terms and in far greater detail than I have had space to do here. But over three days of conference, this was almost the only truly negative note I could discern: houses throughout Europe were upbeat about audiences returning and there was an overwhelming tone of “can do” when it came to innovation and transformation.

The report does not seem to have been authored by experts

Hitherto in this article, I’ve studiously avoided ad hominem arguments, and you can’t fault the credentials of the three advisers who constitute ACE’s “independent Reference Group”. But one does have to question the levels of experience of the report’s two authors. Tamsin Cox’s CV shows plenty of research work on cultural policy. Oliver Mantell, from The Audience Agency, has done plenty of data analysis. However, neither author’s CV shows any prior involvement with opera, so it would appear that they have been learning what they know about the industry concurrently with writing the report – in the period between commissioning and publication.

A clear example of this inexperience shows in the “Share of UK performances by opera company”, which treats small scale productions like Grimeborn or OperaUpClose in the same “Share of performances” table as Covent Garden or Glyndebourne. That’s simply not something an opera expert would have done.

So what is happening here?

The UK opera sector’s biggest fear is that ACE is committed to destroying UK opera in its present form, a fear which the arithmetic of the cuts announced in 2022 somewhat supports. We can all speculate on the reasons, for example pressure from government, or because opera is seen as some combination of too elitist, too expensive and insufficiently diverse (art by dead white people for old white people). If you believe this view, it’s easy to see the report as a simple exercise in drowning debate in a morass of verbiage.

If that is indeed the case, then ACE should be ashamed of itself, taking a deliberate stance against an art form that it is supposed to be there to support, without the courage to admit why and explain where it is putting any money saved.

But there’s a second possible explanation, which is provided by Hanlon’s razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. It may just be that the senior management of ACE actually believe that this is a valid piece of work which they were happy to publish.

In a way, that’s even worse. Is our arts sector really in the hands of people who thought it was OK to commission a major report in such a haphazard way, and are happy to publicise and make policy decisions based on a piece of writing which is so obviously full of flaws and suppositions, so obviously failing to display a rigorous thread of reasoning by people knowledgeable in the field? If that’s the case, we have a far bigger problem than just a government that happens not to like opera.