Alexandra Wilson’s history of the art form in Britain shows how it used to appeal to everyone, from miners to lords
The target of Alexandra Wilson’s book is a view succinctly put by a Daily Express article in 2017: “The popular image of opera is that it’s for posh people, exorbitantly expensive, often incomprehensible and seems to drag on forever.” The proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus would “rather stick pins in his eyes than attend a performance”.
Wilson, presently senior research fellow in music at Jesus College, Oxford, maintains that this attitude has an illuminating history. “Once upon a time, not so very long ago, opera was accepted as a form of entertainment anyone could enjoy if they were so minded to go and see one.” Explaining how we got from there – specifically, the 1920s – to where we are now is her main task as a historian. But Wilson also has a polemical point. That things were once different is itself evidence that opera isn’t intrinsically an upper-middle-class taste.
Someone Else’s Music is, of course, intended as an ironic phrase. For all that opera’s critics in Britain liked to paint it as foreign – Italian or, worse, German – or the preserve of the rich, it has roots in Britain that transcend class. By the time Wilson’s story begins, shortly after the end of the First World War, new technologies were already democratising opera’s audience: “Recordings of Caruso… were as likely to be heard belting out of the windows of Durham miners’ cottages as they were from the salons of Kensington.”
Edward Heath’s father, no musician, sang the Verdi aria “Ah, che la morte” at the family piano with no sense of participating in anything high-cultural – it was simply “a good tune”. Wilson’s book is full of such nuggets. One wants, for instance, to know more about the teacher on the Isle of Dogs who, in the 1920s, pulled off an adaptation of The Magic Flute with a cast of 12-year-old schoolboys.
Some of the country’s most successful opera singers came from working-class backgrounds. Geraint Evans was brought up in an impoverished pit village. Edgar Evans, Wilson tells us, was “discovered by a talent scout when singing in a London pub while on a rugby trip from Wales in 1935”. He paid for his singing lessons by taking on a milk round. Naturally, we hear a good deal about the legend of Kathleen Ferrier, the “fun-loving Lancashire lass, unspoilt by fame”.
Wilson brings out the diversity of Britain’s operatic cultures. The audiences at Covent Garden were different from those who frequented the Coliseum for productions of what would evolve into the English National Opera (ENO). And both were different from the audiences at Glyndebourne, likelier to be in evening dress and bearing a Fortnum hamper. But there were also outliers, such as the Old Vic, where many tickets “cost no more than a packet of cigarettes”.
But opera had audiences who never made it to a live performance. The postwar remit of the BBC’s Third Programme, which would eventually turn into Radio 3, included uninterrupted broadcasts of opera, and a good deal of programming designed to explain and interpret the works for its small but committed group of listeners, looking to be informed, educated and entertained.
As a grim counterpoint to this story of state patronage combined with private largesse, Wilson gives us the slow rise to prominence of a term once unknown in Britain: “elitism”. Opera would come to be a fixture in debates about public subsidy for the arts. Conservative governments from the 1980s onwards, ideologically disinclined to subsidise anything, much preferred the sort of artistic endeavour that could pay for itself. Labour governments, less opposed to public subsidy in principle, tended not to like the idea of giving it to the preferred weekend pastimes (as they incorrectly supposed) of Tory voters.
Over time, the very concept of the “arts” came to be replaced in official vocabulary by the looser and more relativistic terms, “culture” and “creative industries”. But the operatic institutions had long wrestled with these questions. Opera, with its large casts, crews and orchestras, will always be expensive. Sparer productions were possible, but audiences drawn to opera’s lavish decadence rarely warmed to them.
Wilson has brisk and persuasive responses to those who accuse opera of elitism. Elitist how? Is it the price? Tickets to a Taylor Swift concert are more expensive by an order of magnitude; the cheapest seats at both Covent Garden and the ENO sell out the fastest. And a ticket to watch touring companies or a performance at a regional theatre is unlikely to set you back more than a cinema ticket. Moreover, productions at Covent Garden are broadcast live at cinemas across the country.
Is it that the rich are more frequently to be found at the opera? But they are more frequently found at everything: restaurants, gyms, football matches. Is it that the opera is full of bejewelled prima donnas? But operatic superstars are rare – your typical singer would be lucky to be earning the national median wage.
Are operas “unrelatable”? “No more than James Bond, and often less.” Is it that their conventions are arcane? Well, so are those of cricket. Is it that operas are generally in foreign languages? With the advent of surtitles, that makes them no harder to access than Squid Game or Shogun. Is it the off-putting people in dinner jackets and tiaras? But with the partial exception of Glyndebourne in the summer, black tie is rare at the opera, and often the choice of people who treat it as a harmless bit of fancy-dress for a night out.
Wilson relays, sympathetically, the many arguments over what opera should be, and for whom. But she frequently betrays her impatience with self-styled champions of opera who have done the form nothing but harm. It is one thing for institutions to involve local communities in their productions, to go into primary schools and think about imaginative possibilities for staging, but their understanding of what could make opera “relevant” to new audiences tends to be insulting to the very people they hope to draw in. As if La Bohème, “preoccupied almost like no other with the idea of youth”, could only be relevant to a young audience if the performers snort cocaine on stage.
She is more sympathetic to the approach adopted by the Old Vic, “which had engaged audiences suffering social deprivation, but presented a wide range of repertory operas ‘straight’, with no feeling that they must be tailored to, or chosen to resonate in any direct way with, the audience’s lives”. Most of all, she is palpably irritated by figures inside classical music whose excoriations of their own privilege have a performative quality, and serve only to put off audiences who might otherwise be drawn in. They seem, she says, “to want to pull up the ladder behind them”.
She is sparing with autobiographical details but reveals that her path to opera ran through school trips in York and snippets of Inspector Morse. “I bought cheap tickets to see Scottish Opera in Newcastle, borrowed CDs of opera’s greatest hits from the public library, and sang Gilbert and Sullivan. Opera, to me, was a colourful, exuberant, life-affirming way of telling stories through music and drama, and throughout this journey of discovery, nobody, bar nobody, told me opera was elitist, or said it wasn’t for people like me.”
Nor to me. I had advantages: for an Indian, there was nothing the tiniest bit off-putting or elitist about a form of entertainment that went on for three hours and in which the characters broke into song at every opportunity. The cartoon Duck Tales featuring the “Ride of the Valkyries” on its soundtrack had once inspired me to drape myself in a bedsheet and charge about the house bellowing, in my unbroken voice, “Dum-dah-dah-DAH-dah, Dum-dah-dah-DAH-dah”.
My serious operatic education began as a student in England, stunned by an undergraduate Magic Flute with jumpers for costumes and cardboard-box sets. I soon discovered the Welsh National Opera’s touring productions, the Oxfordshire County Library’s collection of libretti and Michael Tanner’s waspish reviews for the Spectator. This was before Spotify and just after the arrival of YouTube. Every Radio 3 broadcast was by then available to “listen again” as often as one wanted. The ticket stubs I have kept confirm that I didn’t once pay more than £20 for an opera ticket until I was well into my thirties.
I was pleased to learn from Wilson’s book that my experiences of opera were so far from being the exception. Indeed, they were once virtually the norm. Britons should be prouder of this heritage.
Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British Alexandra WilsonOxford University Press, 296pp, £22.99
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[Further reading: Downton Abbey might just save the Tories]