Every penny spent on opera repays us in numerous ways

Opera is in the dock again. Once more the charge sheet has been read out, almost salaciously: it costs too much to put on, and too few people are interested. The composers are almost exclusively dead white men, who were born in odd places like Italy, Germany and Russia, and the audience is full of snobs. Wouldn’t we be better off spending our money on work that reflects the vibrant, diverse nature of our own society?

According to figures released by Arts Council England for 2017-18, the companies run by Welsh National Opera, Opera North and English National Opera received astronomical public subsidies. Opera North, for example, received £108 for each ticket it sold. Put like that, you don’t have to be a social justice warrior to wonder whether we are getting value for money.

Yet the answer is: we are. No matter how much public money is showered on the opera, ballet and theatre companies in the UK, as a nation we feel the benefit many times over. One of the reasons this country is so attractive to people from overseas is the abundance of talent. No other land has produced so many gifted writers, actors, singers, musicians, and directors, and most owe their opportunity to subsidy.

It is not a perfect world. Too much money still goes to London-based companies, though as London is the world’s leading city for the performing arts that is hardly a surprise. It is true that we need more income from private sources. In America there is a tradition of philanthropy that shames us on this side of the Atlantic, and not only in this country. A reliance on public money also encourages a conformist mentality, where people of like minds flock like birds of a feather. Will the National Theatre ever commission a play about grooming gangs? A real national theatre would at least consider it.

Kingsley Amis was on to something when he wrote that work reliant on subsidy would lead to people speaking to their peers, rather than a general audience. “Sod the public”, he called it. Nowhere is this clearer than the world of the visual arts. The Turner Prize has been a joke for years, and not a particularly funny one. The Booker Prize has gone the same way. If you really want to know which books are worth reading, don’t pay any attention to the Booker judges. As Keats knew, we must be suspicious of art that has designs upon us. Away, all you social engineers!

Opera is expensive for a good reason. It requires plenty of bodies, in the pit and on the stage. At its greatest, though, in the music dramas of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, to use the most obvious examples, it reaches heights that every human should experience. The Ring cycle will reveal far more about what it means to be alive than any number of finger-wagging films by Ken Loach.

The real scandal in the cultural world is the price of theatre tickets. A trip to the West End is an increasingly grubby experience, which costs an arm and a leg. And when you look at the price of tickets for Premier League football, a night at the opera seems a steal! So who are the snobs? The folk who part with up to £100 20 or 30 times a year to watch men kick a ball about, or those who treat themselves to an occasional evening at Covent Garden, one of the world’s great lyric theatres?

We need our mummers, and we need our singers and musicians. It’s something we happen to do well, and the world thanks us for it, however much – or little – it may cost.