Let's Create: Opera and Music Theatre Analysis
Introduction
Introduction
In January 2023, Arts Council England announced that we would commission an independent analysis of the opera and music theatre sector in England (“the Analysis”). This was intended to gather up-to-date information on the wider operating context for the professional opera and music theatre sector in our country. It was also designed to provide us with a starting point for a conversation about how the Arts Council and the opera and music theatre sector can work together to ensure that the production and presentation ecology of this important artform can thrive in the 21st century. From our perspective, that conversation will be driven by our deep belief in the value of opera and music theatre and the people and companies that make it, and our conviction that it should play a distinctive and key role in the delivery of Let’s Create.
In May 2023 we appointed independent research consultancy DHA, working in partnership with The Audience Agency, to undertake the Analysis, which we are pleased to be publishing today. With additional input from MyCake, who provide financial benchmarking for the third sector, the research team has prepared a valuable account of the publicly funded and privately supported professional opera and music theatre sector in England. Bringing together data and understanding from a range of perspectives, the Analysis seeks to provide a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the sector than has previously been available, and to make visible knowledge which may already exist, but which has not always been clearly and openly articulated to date.
In preparing this Analysis, the researchers talked to a wide range of individuals, and to organisations both inside and outside our National Portfolio. This has included opera and music theatre companies, venues receiving touring opera and music theatre, conservatoires, unions, and freelancers. We are grateful to everyone who has given up their time to take part in interviews and focus groups. We are also grateful to the three-person external Reference Group – Anthony Blackstock, Jan Younghusband and Fiona Allan – who, alongside Andrew Miller from our National Council, have acted as ‘critical friends’ to the Arts Council throughout the process.
What happens next?
What happens next?
Arts Council England makes a significant investment in opera and music theatre in this country. Between 2023 and 2026 we will invest £130m in regular funding for 14 opera companies, in addition to many awards to smaller organisations and individuals who work in the sector through our National Lottery Project Grants and Developing Your Creative Practice programmes. As England’s Development Agency for Culture and Creativity, we want to ensure we invest our resources in ways that meet the long-term interests of both the public and the opera and music theatre sector in this country. We therefore want to use the publication of the Analysis to start a new conversation with the sector about the picture it reveals, and how we – both Arts Council England and organisations and individuals working in the sector – should respond to its findings.
Our task, now, is to listen carefully to the sector’s response to the Analysis and, from there, to develop our conclusions and consider possible actions. Over the coming weeks, therefore, we will hold a series of roundtable discussions with a range of people from across the opera and music theatre sector. We will ensure that the voices of the same broad range of stakeholder groups who contributed to the Analysis are represented in these discussions. These roundtables will offer an opportunity to test with the sector whether it recognises – and supports – the interpretation of the information presented in the Analysis. And they will provide a forum in which we can begin to develop actions we can take, separately and together, to ensure that opera and music theatre play a central role in delivering Let’s Create, and in enriching the cultural life of this country into the future.
The insights from these roundtables will also contribute to the development of a formal Arts Council response to the Analysis, which we expect to publish this summer. That response will help us think about the role that National Lottery Project Grants might play in supporting the sector going forward. We also expect that the conversation we have with the sector over the next few months will help inform the investments we make in our new National Portfolio that will now start in April 2027.
We expect there to be interest from the sector in discussing a wide range of issues arising from the Analysis, and we will design the roundtables to ensure a range of topics can be covered. From our perspective, we are particularly interested in using these conversations to explore four areas that have been identified in the Analysis:-
- 1/. Innovation and new work
How can Arts Council England and the sector work together to support innovation in the way opera and music theatre is made and presented, including the commissioning of more new work?
- 2/. Touring and audience development
What steps might be taken individually and collectively to a) create a more sustainable touring offer, and b) develop new audiences for opera and music theatre?
- 3/. Talent
What can be done to improve the development – and retention – of a wider range of talent to fuel the future of opera and music theatre both on and off the stage?
- 4/. Sector organisation and communication
How might the opera and music theatre sector come together regularly to discuss matters of shared interest, and ensure that these shared perspectives are clearly articulated to others across both opera and music theatre and the wider arts sector, as well as to the Arts Council, Government, and other stakeholders?
To be as useful as possible, we believe these roundtable discussions will need to recognise that:-
- Publicly funded opera and music theatre – in common with other parts of the publicly funded cultural sector – have seen significant real-term reductions in national and local funding over the last decade. While this has been offset for some organisations by welcome tax credits, recent rises in the cost of living mean that financial pressures on the sector are currently very significant. This necessarily limits their ability to invest in innovation and risk-taking.
- Current demands on Arts Council budgets are high, and we expended all our unallocated reserves to support the cultural sector during the pandemic. This means that any changes that we – Arts Council or the sector – wish to implement as a result of these discussions will almost certainly need to involve a repurposing of existing funding, rather than allocating significant additional resources.
- The Arts Council’s current strategy, Let’s Create, will run until 2030. This strategy shapes the way we work and invest across all the areas of creativity and culture for which we have responsibility. It recognises that audiences are generally not loyal to a single art form and encourages us to think about the way that different artforms and disciplines can and do interconnect. We also believe a single cross-cutting strategy helps identify how practice in one art form or geographic area can influence that in another. We will not therefore produce separate artform (or genre) strategies to supplement Let’s Create.
We are excited to be embarking on the next phase of this project and for the new, closer and more effective ways of working that will hopefully emerge from it. The Arts Council remains committed to – and ambitious for – the future of opera and music theatre in England. The Analysis confirms that the sector continues to share our view that this is an artform that can engage, excite and enthral the audiences of the future. Our shared challenge is to ensure that we put in place the conditions that mean that those audiences are drawn from all our communities in all parts of this country.
Background
Background
Let’s Create is our ten-year strategy (2020-2030) for culture and creativity. We use it to shape all our policy work and investment decisions. It sets out our vision, the three Outcomes we’d like to see, and the four Investment Principles that we think should underpin the way cultural organisations work.
Our Delivery Plan, which set out the actions we’re taking to make the vision of Let’s Create a reality, is regularly updated to reflect progress, and to ensure it remains relevant to the changing context in which we’re operating. Our current Plan (2021-24) sets out the Actions we will take to March 2024. A Delivery Plan for 2024-27 will be published in the next few months.
From time to time we complement our strategy with research that looks at particular parts of our cultural sector in detail. We use the results of those studies to shape our future investment and policy in those sectors. Recent examples of these studies include our work on producing theatre (read the report and read our response) and literary fiction (read the report and read our response).
Opera and music theatre play a major role in delivering Let’s Create. This Analysis will help us, and the sector, look in more detail at some of the questions that emerged following our last National Portfolio Organisation decisions. We are confident that this Analysis will allow us to build strong foundations for our work in supporting all parts of this hugely important sector going forward.
To undertake this Analysis, we commissioned an independent research organisation to help us gather information and develop a detailed picture of the state of opera and music theatre in this country. We posted the opportunity to tender for the research on our procurement site, Delta. Find out more about the tender process and read the invitation to tender.
In addition to the external research organisation, we appointed a three-person external Reference Group to act as ‘critical friends’ to the Arts Council as we undertook this work. The Reference Group membership was as follows:
Fiona Allan is an international performing arts leader. She commenced in the role of CEO at Opera Australia (OA) in November 2021, and since then has worked with the board on the creation of a new organisational strategy that refocuses OA as an opera company for a 21st century Australia. She has managed the transition of artistic leadership and led a global search for a new Artistic Director.
Prior to joining Opera Australia Fiona spent 18 years working in the UK in senior artistic and executive leadership roles. Most recently she was Artistic Director & CEO of Birmingham Hippodrome, a large multi-genre arts centre which is also home to four resident dance organisations and presented regular seasons of opera. Before that, she was CEO of Curve Theatre, a producing theatre creating new theatre and musical productions from its purpose-built rehearsal and performance spaces in Leicester, and touring these around the UK. Her first role in the UK was as Artistic Director of Wales Millennium Centre, the national performing arts centre based in Cardiff.
Anthony Blackstock’s career has centred on the running and appraising of performing arts producers. He has acted as executive, trustee, assessor and consultant. He was Chief Financial Officer of The Arts Council and then The National Theatre. Subsequent assignments have included Interim Resources Director of English National Opera, financial consultant to Chichester Festival Theatre, Interim Finance Director of The South Bank Centre, advisor to the Royal Shakespeare Company on options for its redevelopment and on governance, consultant to The Arts Council’s 2013 analysis of Opera and Ballet, consultant to Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Trinity Laban, business modeller at Factory International, associate producer at Le Théâtre du Châtelet and (pro bono) governance advisor to a privately funded opera company. He served as chair of the finance and/or audit committees of Youth Music, The Roundhouse, Poole Arts Centre and Central School of Speech and Drama.
Jan Younghusband is an award-winning TV, Film commissioner and producer and author. Classically trained, she started her career in opera production at Glyndebourne and went on to work as assistant to Sir Peter Hall on his opera productions including the Ring in Bayreuth. After a move to TV in the 1990s Jan converted her love of opera into making films for TV and producing coverage of live operas for cinema and TV which expressed opera for the broader audience. She also commissioned new operas for TV and documentary series with unique insights into the story of opera, presented and featuring leading figures in the industry. Jan was Head of Arts Commissioning at Channel Four for ten years and then Head of Music and Events TV at the BBC, commissioning across all genres of music.