• ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY. LEISURE OPERA

For whom did you say?

RODNEY MILNES

Opera has no shortage of enemies (among them the editor of this weekly and Ken- neth Tynan are one ill-assorted pair), but When you look at the antics of some of its friends—well, Who needs enemies, as I unfairly remarked to the man contemplat- ing the foundation of the 'Enemies of Cov- ent Garden'.

Among its less welcome friends could be counted Alan Blyth, one of our more prolific music critics if not one of the more influential, who, in an article ab- surdly entitled 'Opera for the Masses' in the New Statesman last month, proceeded to savage one of the few organisations with any pretensions in that direction, Sadler's Wells Opera. The burden of his plaint is that here is the Wells throwing away all that money at the Coliseum while the under-subsidised Welsh and Scottish opera companies take on the touring commitments formerly taken on by the Wells. All the Wells is actually doing at the Coliseum is perform- ing the standard repertory, with some worthwhile additions, in the language of the audience—something Covent* Garden Opera used to do before Georg Solti arrived and it became Royal and foreign. I don't understana why 'international standards' (what are they?) mean we must nationally support the Garden, but not the Wells.

A lot of sentimental twaddle is written about touring. Thirty-seven per cent of the population of England and Wales lives Within easy reach of London. Over sixty- live per cent of performances given by Sadler's Wells this season are outside Lon- don. In the interests of 'the masses' they must arrange to tour less next season by at least two per cent.

Touring is. I suspect, a useful emotional lever with which to prise money out of the Arts Council—I cannot conceive any Other reason for the Welsh National Com- Pany to tour in Sunderland, for heaven's sake. And it is not insignificant in the Glyndebourne touring operation: I ant dubious about how much the regional masses.' are getting out of Glyndehourne's unknown Rossini (Turco in Italia) sung in. Italian. At the performance I heard in Liverpool last week a distinctly un-massy audience (not a Ford striker to be seen) look forty-five minutes to twig that it was meant to he funny.. and the Glynde- bourne original-language Pugene One gin, With .British singers singing in Russian to a British audience, is scarcely geared to ntass appeal. That both performances were first-rate in their own way is scarcely releyant. Does Scottish Opera touring bits of 'he Ring in German offer a great deal to anyone. save any passing Vo/k whose Oper Mr Blyth wants Sadler's Wells to be? (London is not Vienna. and on the strength of opera performances I saw there last

month I'm damned glad.)

The emergency additional Arts Council grant of £82,000 to the Coliseum for the current financial year (a similar £100,000 to Covent Garden for the last one appar- ently exercises Blyth not at all) covered not only a £30,000 reduction in Arts Coun- cil grant from the previous year (at least they tried), but also an increment for mem- bers of the chorus, a new wage scale for stage staff and less stringent redundancies among orchestral players than had been foreseen, i.e. it benefited persons who might conceivably come under the heading of the 'masses', the sudden concern for whom on Blyth's part is so moving. As the budget for the Coliseum's next season is not completed, it is difficult to imagine how he comes by the loss figure of a quarter of a million built into it. Blyth's bias against the Coliseum is too obvious to go unremarked and it is sad that what ap- pears to be a personal feud should be conducted in the pages of a national weekly.

If there is any significance in value for money, or performances given to the pub- lic in proportion to Arts Council grant, then in the last examinable financial year (69/70) Covent Garden gave 453 perform- ances in this country, of which 318 were of ballet, for the subsidy of £1,400,000 (that is .€3.091 per performance), whereas the Wells gave 390 performances of opera for a subsidy of £762,000 (thil is £1,954 per performance). Welsh and Scottish companies. with smaller grants and fewer performances, work out at £2,439 and £2,193 per show, respectively.

Kenneth Tynan's concept of social re- levance is more approachable than Blyth's 'masses'. a condescending and olde-worlde term that sits comfortably on the pages of the Statesman. Tynan's attack on sub- sidised opera. made over two years ago in the Observer and never properly coun- tered at the time (though the Sunday Times critic did tell us all what a lovely time he'd been having in opera houses recently), was centred on whether the cost of what he called 'orchestrally backed singing . . . as practised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' had swollen 'out of

all proportion to its social relevance'. It is true that far too few mid-twentieth-century operas are performed in this country—this is the Achilles heel in the defence of sub- sidised opera. But the future looks brighter, with Covent Garden promising us new works by Peter Maxwell Davies, John Tavcner and Harrison Birtwistle.

As for the present, there is no infallible scale of social relevance (some of my best friends are sociologists, and they would

have told me if there were) but I suspect that there is little in, say. Un ballin maschera as currently performed at the

Garden, where an enormously expensive Italian tenor, Carlo Bergonzi, sings quite beautifully (in Italian) but gives an irres- istibly comic acting performance in a ser- ious role (can this be 'international stand- ard'?). There is rather more in the Colis- eum's Wagner performances in compre- hensible English attended by a noticeably younger audience.

I would go so far as to say, and here I part company with many operagoers.

though not with thousands of potential

operagoers. that there is no social relevance in any foreign-language performance. We do not subsidise the National Theatre to perform Feydeau in French or Ostrovsky in Russian, and unless you place the de- tailed niceties of word setting above the importance of overall meaning, then the analogy stands.

The mainspring of Tynan's argument, with his deadly mention of nineteenth-cen-

tury extravaganzas, is money. Where does

it go? Orchestras and competent singers are necessary; much of the decor you see, not to mention Signor Bergonzi, is not. No

less than a Times first leader in 1968 (said to have been composed following a tete a tete luncheon for Lord Drogheda, Chair- man of Covent Garden and the Times editor and senior music critic) set the seal

of approval, as it were, on decorative extravagance by noting 'the change in taste from painted backcloths to solid,

realistic scenery'. An example of the latter is Lila de Nobili's realistic sets for Rigo- letto, which are easy on the eye but irrele- vant to the needs of the opera today.

Operatic corridors buzz with rumours of how much is squandered on decor, coun-

tering claims of careful budgeting (I know of two designers who were not even given budgets when commissioned by subsidised companies). Did the moving film taken to cover the scene changes in The Knot Gar- den really cost the 0 1.000-odd that rattled

round the Covent Garden • foyers? We don't even know if the film worked. be- cause it was dropped before the first night!

The publication of detailed accounts, down to the last screw, of a whole new production would be extremely informative and could even lead to the sort of economies that would help those who believe opera to be enor- mously worthwhile to look squarely in the eye those who don't. As it is, those who don't have plenty of reason for unease.