First Person: soprano Elizabeth Atherton on the decimation of the classical music sector in Wales

Is it an opera company’s role to avert climate change? Should a circus troupe have to prioritize promoting the Welsh language? Is the purpose of a dance ensemble to bring about social justice? Should these issues be the main focus for our arts organisations? Surely not, and yet…  

Just a glance at the six core funding principles with which the Arts Council of Wales (ACW) judges whether the arts organisations it exists in order to support are worthy of public subsidy shows that these are the very measures by which they are deciding which companies in Wales will be prioritised. 

Not excellence. Not quality of product – neither of which are mentioned once in the arm’s-length body’s investment review guidelines. It seems that those currently holding the purse strings for our cultural institutions view the arts as a forum to enact ideological mission of their (or, truthfully, the current government’s) determining, as opposed to creating cultural experiences of inherent value and excellence, worthy of funding for their own sake and for the joy and enrichment that they bring to countless people’s lives. (Pictured below: Rhian Passmore MS, Chair of the Senedd's Cross Party Group for Music, Delyth Jewell MS, Chair of the Culture Committee, and Elizabeth Atherton)It’s no better over the border where Arts Council England’s (ACE) notorious Let’s Create strategy has been responsible for decimating numerous arts organisations. It struck me, when sitting in on a webinar during which Nicholas Serota, Chair of ACE, and CEO Darren Henley were speaking, that there are several deeply problematic issues with the path they have opted to take, which has moved the body a long way from the Arts Council of Great Britain’s defined purpose when it was established in 1946 as being “to maintain the highest possible standard in the arts”.

Most of us in the arts would agree that the abandonment of creative arts education in schools has been devastating. We need high-quality music education back in schools, starting from when a child first enters the system and enabling regular class learning, theory, history, exposure to different genres, opportunities to learn an instrument in one-to-one lessons with highly trained teachers and access to instruments, the chance to sing in choirs, to play in ensembles, to perform to audiences. Who wouldn’t agree with that?

But should it be the duty of arts organisations to supply that musical education? Or is it the government’s responsibility to fund and provide education to our children as part of the curriculum? Sure, the work that many arts organisations carry out with young people is incredibly valuable, but the funding that they receive from the arts councils should not be dependent on how much they do, where they do it, or how they do it. Just like promoting Welsh or mitigating climate change, education should be seen as an added bonus that our arts organisations commit to, not the be-all-and-end-all. The work they do in these areas should supplement what our elected governments provide, acting as an adjunct – not do the job for them. Pictured below: members of the WNO Chorus at the protest. Surely questions need to be asked when apparently 80% of the activity included in Welsh National Opera’s funding agreements with both Arts Councils Wales and England (the company has historically been funded by both nations since the 1970s to reflect the proportion of work that they carry out in each) is attributed to the company’s ‘Programmes and Engagement’ work.

Whilst the community engagement, education and health work that WNO carries out is undoubtedly incredibly valuable, at what point does the organisation cease to be an international opera company whose purpose is to produce operatic productions of the highest calibre and morph into a community outreach provider which mounts the odd opera on the side? Is this really what we want Wales’s only full-time (for now, at least) opera company to become?

As well as ACE and ACW’s enthusiasm for our arts organisations to educate, their push towards devolution and localism is a fine aspiration in many ways, bringing the arts into communities, giving them ownership, and hopefully increasing participation. But what does it mean for our large, national companies? Those who produce work on a scale that smaller, local organisations simply cannot? Those who represent the UK on the world’s stage and attract talent here to work and tourists here to holiday? Those who rival the greatest international arts companies?

Whilst the grassroots companies are vital for the health of our sector, so too is the top of the pyramid, and by thinking that just by sharing the resources around a bit and taking away from the top to give more to the foundations everything will be ok – no, better even – it’s a false premise.

The arts ecosystem needs every bit of the infrastructure supported to a sufficient level to thrive. By decimating the largest companies that necessarily need the lion’s share of resources we will all be the poorer, as they will ultimately cease to be the powerhouses that they have been, our children beginning their journeys will have nothing to aspire to, and our audiences will dwindle as only the rich will be able to afford to go to large-scale productions. That’s not to say that savings cannot and should not be found by our larger institutions. They must be found. But ripping those companies apart and diminishing their capabilities beyond recognition so that they are unable to employ their musicians in a full-time capacity, as is currently being proposed by WNO, or tour to towns who have no other provision is not the answer. Nor is it even vaguely logical when one of Let’s Create’s and ACW’s central premises is to encourage more arts provision in the regions. Someone please explain how ACE annihilating Glyndebourne Tour and diminishing WNO’s extensive touring pattern has improved the provision of opera for Liverpool residents? Answer – it hasn’t. Liverpool has gone from receiving regular opera productions from both companies to zero opera.

Anyway, is it even appropriate for our arts councils to dictate a creative vision, such as Let’s Create? Surely the whole purpose of the body is to remain neutral, not to have its own agendas to push, but to support arts organisations to imagine their own artistic purpose? I hardly think that when Jennie Lee, daughter of a Scottish miner and committed socialist, wrote the first White Paper on the arts in 1965, she would have approved of ACE and ACW deciding what the companies they owe their existences to must pursue as their overriding aims. As Lord Keynes had said some twenty years earlier when establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain, “The arts owe no vow of obedience”.

And so back to Wales where the arts are literally in crisis right now. Funding by Welsh Government (where Labour has held power for twenty-five years) to ACW has been reduced by about 37% in real terms since 2010. As a proportion of the Welsh Government budget, cultural spending is one of the lowest in Europe, standing at less than 0.15% of total overall expenditure – ten times less than the European average.

Despite this continued lack of financial investment or commitment to the arts that has been shown by Welsh Government, ACW managed to find an extra £900,000 to distribute to arts organisations in its latest funding round, meaning that twenty-three new organisations were given multi-year funding for the first time. Good news, one might think – unless you’re an opera lover.

Mid Wales Opera, surely a fine example of all you would have thought ACW would support in a mid-scale, touring opera company, which for decades has successfully taken opera to the provinces and provided artists at the beginning of their careers with their first professional opportunities, was slammed with a 100% cut to their funding last autumn. The damning verdict of ACW was that the company’s application “does not excite”, ignoring the fact that it uses tried and tested methods to reach numerous communities who would be without opera otherwise, commissions brand new work, employs community choruses, develops Welsh artists just starting out, and provides education work to hundreds of children. Welsh National Opera (chorus and orchestra in rehearsal with the great Carlo Rizzi pictured above), whose ACE grant had already been slashed by 35% in November 2022 and who were given little choice but to sign up to a “Transform” fund committing them to radically downsize, also came into ACW’s firing line last autumn. Although ACW knew full well that WNO was being forced to scale back its touring and lay off staff, they decided to cut the company again by a further 11.8%, hiding behind the excuse that their own funding had been cut whilst simultaneously distributing almost a million pounds more (enough to maintain the full-time status of the WNO musicians’ contracts for another two years).

As if this double-whammy to classical music in the Land of Song weren’t enough, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama suddenly announced that it is completely axing its junior department and from this academic year is the only conservatoire in the UK without regular junior provision.

Questions must surely be asked as to how the college got into the position that they saw cancelling all their training for young aspiring musicians and actors as a necessary evil without raising what must have been on the cards for some time with external agencies and government before crisis point was reached. More fundamentally though, Wales needs to ask itself whether it wants a thriving arts sector – whether classical music and opera are even important any more.

What value does an opera company bring to a small nation anyway? Does Wales really need one when we have a crumbling NHS and failing school system?

I would argue yes, yes – and yes again. Not simply for the benefits in terms of health, education and engagement, but for the inherent value that the art form has of itself and the joy and enrichment that it brings to thousands of people’s lives.

With new leadership in place, both in Westminster and the Senedd, serious questions need to be addressed and imminent action taken if our classical music sector is to be rescued in Wales. Inquiries into both ACE and ACW are urgently required – no more hiding behind the “arm’s-length body” principle by politicians. If the arts councils are not accountable to government when things have gone so badly wrong, then who holds the checks and balances? No more England blaming Wales and Wales blaming England. Yes, the arts are devolved, but WNO executes significant amounts of its work in England and for that reason is funded by both nations who need to work together to save the company before it’s too late.

Wales needs a pipeline of talent right through – from children accessing music education, through conservatoire/university training, then small- and mid-scale companies where artists starting out can cut their teeth, and finally our national opera company and symphony orchestra (BBC NOW) which rival the best in the world and of which our small nation should be incredibly proud.

“The arts are essential to any complete national life. The nation owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them,” spoke Sir Winston Churchill. Oh, that our politicians today might understand the wisdom in those words before it’s too late.

UPDATE: It has recently been revealed that a review into ACE that had been begun prior to the General Election has quietly been closed by the new Labour administration in Westminster, despite them promising one in their arts manifesto Creative Growth. In a letter to Elizabeth, Sir Chris Bryant MP wrote that “it would not be appropriate for us as Ministers to intervene regarding funding decisions [about WNO] made by arm’s-length bodies” and that “the public body review was paused during the election and has now been closed”.

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