London

Martin Hoyle

One of the shrewdest remarks ever made by a politician was Gerald Kaufman’s definition of the Royal Opera House as a club where you were made to feel an unwelcome outsider. The artily inclined MP was speaking to a Commons committee on Covent Garden’s then financial chaos and turmoil. Several million pounds later, the new accessible ROH with its state-of-the-art stagecraft, elegant public spaces and a matey supremo called Tony (Hall), the place is – er – the same. It illustrates something endemic in British high culture, especially in classical music and particularly opera. Feature continues

Covent Garden’s an obvious target, of course. What’s alarming is that there’s an arrogance that trickles through the classical music scene from tiara’d galas to those supercilious spectators who glare at intrusive applause. The pity of it is that London is, by general assent, the world capital of classical performance, unequalled in quality and variety by New York, Paris, Vienna or Berlin. And the notoriously underpaid local talent that actually makes music is often the envy of the world for sight-reading, learning new music quickly and sometimes exhilaratingly flying by the seat of threadbare pants.

Apart from eternal money problems (compare public subsidy in France or Germany), London’s brilliant talent is handicapped by certain social assumptions that seem to have survived from the Edwardian age. Pity the poor singer, conductor or fiddler dying to communicate with a bigger, younger, more varied public. They probably don’t realise that many PRs, agents or managers evince fastidious contempt for soiling their hands in publicity or advertising.

Paying punters don’t experience this, but they suffer the results of the genteel dilettantism that is the true vice anglais. Starting with the governmental indifference that leaves minority high culture to the mercy of private money with its attendant social snobbery and intellectual lethargy. Has Tony Blair ever been to Covent Garden? Margaret Thatcher would occasionally cast a basilisk eye from a box, quite as frightening as anything on stage (I remember during Berlioz’ ‘Damnation of Faust’, that fable of a man selling his soul to the devil, her leaning forward in rapt attention, as if picking up, or possibly preparing to offer, tips).

Everybody says the greatest anomaly of London’s classical scene is the lack of an international-standard concert hall for its staggering orchestral talent. More insidious is the lingering attitude of classical music being for a class and a generation. Money’s needed to free concerts and operas from hatchet-faced pedants and braying socialites. Ken Livingstone should be seen at ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, a counter-blast to the patronising left-wing assumption that non-toffs can’t appreciate high art – just as arrogant in its way as the toffs’ exclusivity. The classical establishment, including its joyless hangers-on who insist on treating it as a near-religious experience, has disappeared up its own ivory tower.