France is not the only country to worry about its operas. Some of the British artists invited this year to the Aix-en-Provence Lyric Art Festival and the Grand Raout d’Avignon are also worried about the cuts in cultural funding in their country and which, according to them, threaten orchestras and operas. . Brexit, pandemic, inflation, dwindling support: the ills have been piling up for culture in Britain for some years. And in recent months, two major institutions have made announcements that have shaken the artistic community.
In October 2022, Arts Council England (ACE) – which funds the arts nationally with government funds and National Lottery proceeds – announced that several cultural structures in London were to suffer cuts. The English National Opera, the second opera company, is the hardest hit, with the withdrawal of 12.6 million pounds (14.6 million euros). He should benefit from a year’s respite and then from a possible relocation outside the capital. These adjustments follow a request from the British government, which wanted the ACE to decentralize part of its subsidies so that other cities could benefit from them. This decision “will benefit the public going to the opera for the first time”, justified the ACE.
The biggest national employer for classical music, the BBC – whose government has also frozen license fees for two years, creating a massive hole in its finances – has been forced to organize a voluntary redundancy plan targeting 20% of its workforce. his three English orchestras. The media juggernaut had also announced in March the abolition of the “BBC Singers”, the only permanent professional choir in the country… before retracting after an open letter from 700 composers from around the world.
“We must remain optimistic, even if the arts are going through a difficult period in Great Britain, declared the star maestro Simon Rattle, who comes to conduct an opera and a concert in Aix. Often, the first thing we think of in politics is to cut… These are aberrant and tragic moments, but we hope to continue to see art, culture when we get out of all that”.
“I was shocked and angry,” composer George Benjamin, who is about to present a world premiere, Picture a Day Like This, to AFP, told AFP. In a country endowed with “wonderful orchestras and quality composers and singers (…) this is a sad and worrying time”, he adds. “I’m afraid there is a severe fracture, I’ve never felt that in my life, warns the composer, whose two operas created in Aix had met with great success. If you consider the arts as having no value, you will of course lower the support”.
For Tim Etchells, who will present a traveling play in French in Avignon, “the general context is rather precarious due to the change in priorities” of the government. “The big problem is that there is not enough money given to the arts; and even if there is a desire to transfer more funds to the northern regions, it is really not necessary to play the regions against each other”, says the director.
The director Tim Crouch, who is presenting two plays in Avignon, is worried about the increase in ticket prices in the West End in London where many theaters are concentrated. “There are a lot of small places that are closing,” he regrets. Annoyance is not limited to classical artists. “Why do you think I spend a lot of time (in France)?”, told AFP Damon Albarn, of the Blur group, which he reformed. “It’s the only place where I can get an order to do an opera around Goethe, which will be premiered in 2024 at Lido2Paris. The last time I tried anything in England was at the National Theater and ended up being harassed to do a Christmas show for ‘commercial reasons’.
