This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
What a difference a year makes, unless it doesn’t. Twelve months ago, when we published our last spring Music special, the classical music world had rarely looked bleaker. A decade of funding squeezes, rising costs and Lockdown’s destruction of audiences had placed orchestras and concert halls under unprecedented financial pressure.
Meanwhile, ideologically-motivated defunding by the Arts Councils of England and Wales had stripped large parts of the country of regular access to live opera and pushed major national companies to the brink of collapse.
It was agreed — because the arts world is nothing if not tribal — that this was to be expected after 14 years of Tory government. Concomitantly, Keir Starmer’s Labour party was on the up, and it seemed as if rescue was at hand.
Classical music followers remarked, excitedly, that Starmer had played the flute at school and that his shadow Culture Secretary, Thangam Debbonaire, had been a professional cellist. Once in power they would pause only to play a celebratory Telemann duet before giving the Magic Money Tree a vigorous shake, sending its golden apples cascading into the laps of their loyal and grateful musical chums.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. The arts sector fantasised about a new age of Attlee; what it got was more misery, this time without the hope. “Beautiful means nothing, really” declared Angela Rayner, days into the new government; the unfortunate Debbonaire, meanwhile, contrived to lose her seat in the middle of a Labour landslide.
A year later, the position of classical music in the UK stands pretty much where it did while the world has moved on in ways that make arts funding seem even less of a priority.
Yet one obstinate truth endures, at least as regards classical music (pop can survive easily in the open market and works better when it does). In its most ambitious forms, this art cannot survive for long without some form of subsidy from someone. It never has.
Opera companies and orchestras evolved in an era of royal purses and low living costs, but modern democratic states aspire to share these treasures with everyone. In any nation that values its culture, it follows that subsidy for the fine arts ought to transcend political partisanship, not least that of the artists themselves.
The anti-elitist, levelling-down Left and the know-nothing libertarian Right are both wrong about this. The cost here is the basic entry price of Western civilisation.
Classical music in the UK has participated, submissive and obedient, in its own gaslighting
Still, it’s valid to ask questions about how that subsidy is distributed. In the UK, the various Arts Councils dispense public money, and again, the arm’s-length principle — the understanding that funds will be allocated without political interference — should be beyond dispute.
The problem in England and Wales (arts funding in Scotland has even bigger issues, which can be summarised in the letters S, N and P) is that in recent years, the Arts Councils have been trying to make the political weather.
Dismiss images of John Maynard Keynes and Grey Gowrie — cultured, high-minded public servants inspired by visions of excellence for all. The Arts Council of England (ACE) is now staffed by people who actively resent the classical tradition.
You’ll be familiar with the species: they’re the same folk who have turned our galleries and museums into re-education centres on the evils of colonialism (though only when practised by the West); who feel antique statuary is much improved when children attack it with crayons and whom, you suspect, are secretly rather excited when a stately home in their care is gutted by fire.
You can probably imagine their views on opera and orchestras. Actually, you don’t have to: just glance at the desperate financial plight of English National Opera and Welsh National Opera, the Cambridge-based Britten Sinfonia or the excellent, now defunct, Mancunian new music ensemble Psappha.
Before last July, the classical world cherished the comforting delusion that Arts Council cuts were the result of Gradgrindian Treasury arm-twisting. The election ripped away the mask. A planned independent review of the ACE was suspended, then reinstated with its teeth removed. No one now imagines that it poses any threat to the dysfunctional status quo.
In short, public arts funding in England is in the hands of resentful inadequates who hate a tradition of excellence. In Wales: the same again, but with an added layer of spiteful and divisive linguistic nationalism.
Ignore the official spin: this isn’t about redistributing cultural spending. The threatened companies sit at the centre of national artistic ecosystems. Beyond Wales, Welsh National Opera serves (or served — the cuts have been savage) Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Oxford, Southampton, Plymouth and Milton Keynes; in London, ENO provides a global centre of excellence for English-language opera. To appreciate the scale of the damage, try to imagine Munich, Lyon, Brno or Milan without their opera houses.
Grim times, then? Assuredly. So why — despite everything — do we feel a cautious optimism? In coldly practical terms, a shock (assuming you survive it) can help refocus priorities and awaken dormant survival instincts.
It’s long been evident that the Arts Councils are capricious and unreliable paymasters, and shrewd arts companies were already striving for greater financial autonomy. Most of them have very little fat to shed. Now they’re redoubling their efforts to sell tickets, and to solicit (and reward) private donations.
Responsible governments of all stripes should do more to make such philanthropy tax efficient. The arts world could help by dropping its snobbish disdain for corporate wealth: pecunia non olet and generosity in the common good deserves gratitude, not undergraduate posturing.
Then there are intellectual currents beyond the introspective world of the arts. The claims of those who seek to demoralise and undermine Western culture — the race-baiters, the decolonisers, the trust-fund eco-extremists — are finally being challenged.
That matters for classical music, because, as Paul Lay points out in this edition, this art, more than any, is routinely held to a spiteful double standard. A rapper belts out misogynistic or homophobic lyrics? Relevant. Edgy. The voice of our time. A romantic opera depicts nineteenth-century social norms? An act of patriarchal violence, in urgent need of deconstruction.
There’s an opportunity here for an art to learn to love itself once more. Since 1997 at least, classical music in the UK has participated, submissive and obedient, in its own gaslighting. Tell it that it’s prejudiced, that its masterpieces are “problematic” and that it must jettison time-honoured customs, and its practitioners will swallow these libels without demur.
Classical music remains triumphantly analogue
And yet no musical genre is richer, more genuinely meritocratic and more energetic about seeking and welcoming new listeners. Classical music should quit apologising and start evangelising. Certainly, the wider public has never stopped believing in its power: they want to listen, they just don’t want to be preached at.
Human creativity offers few pleasures to surpass live classical music, whether it’s a late Beethoven sonata suspending time at the Wigmore Hall or your local choral society doing its annual Messiah — complete with all the fluffed entries and dodgy high-notes that make it feel so alive.
In a digital world, classical music remains triumphantly analogue. Amid the shriek of electronic fakery, it gives us truth made by human hearts and voices. Among crowds, it confers solitude; to the lonely, it offers emotional fellowship.
In an age which is ever more distracted, paying ever less attention to that which is true and good, classical music continues to take exactly as much time as it needs and fills it with beauty which can make sense of the universe.
An eighteenth-century critic of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther noted that the smell of freshly-baked bread was a more powerful argument for being in this world than all the high-flown reasons that Goethe’s suicidal hero offered for quitting it.
Money is scarce; politics are dispiriting; modernity is garish, brittle and shrill. But the opening chord of a Mozart quintet still speaks louder — and deeper — than them all. All we have to do is listen.
