WNO’s curtain call?

There was thunderous applause at Cardiff’s Millennium Centre on Saturday night. It followed well-deserved ovations for the cast of, and production team behind, an outstanding performance of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. But what brought the house down was an impromptu, or at least not advertised epilogue to the opera when Sarah Crabtree and Adele Thomas, two co-chairs running the company came on stage in front of members of their team wearing “Save Our WNO” t-shirts to denounce the Arts Council’s fatally philistine cuts to Welsh National Opera’s budget.

These were decried as bad for “democracy” and the struggle against “disinformation”, which apparently had been the role of public performance since Pericles’ Athens.

Nowadays it seems only reactionaries remember ancient Athens was only democratic in its own historical sense. Would/should a modern theatre-going public applaud a state that excluded women, slaves and resident aliens from its “democracy” just for sponsoring genius? More to the point, isn’t the whole tenor of the libretto of Peter Grimes profoundly anti-democratic, or at the very least dismissive of popular opinion as a moral guide?

If ever there was a blatantly “anti-people opera”, it is surely Britten’s masterpiece.

His crowd as chorus is an active participant in the drama — and a malevolent one — quite unlike, say Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, which Britten had knew well before composing Grimes, where the people’s voices play a big role but primarily as passive whingers.

Grimes is an isolated individual whose bad luck — or form — in employing short-lived apprentices on his fishing boat arouses his neighbours’ suspicions. The people of the Borough are “gossips” whose mutual antagonism to Grimes is stirred up to fever pitch by “influencers”, hardly models of traditional morality but its vindictive voices. Although contemporaries of Britten — including bewildered musicians preparing for the first night in June, 1945 — characterised his music as difficultly modernist, echoing Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, which bore the name of a similarly tragic outsider, Michael Tippett was closer to the truth when he defined an important source of the new opera’s immediate popularity with the notoriously conservative English music-loving public was that it was verismo in a modern style but with much of the appeal of a tragedy like Cavalleria Rusticana.

There is talk about providing the arts with “outreach to new audiences” all while savagely cutting it back

The conductor, Tomas Hanus, whipped up not just the convincing meteorological storms but also waves of popular anger and of the psychic torment of Grimes and his two sympathisers. Nicky Spence’s performance rose to tragic greatness across the span of the opera and, though a sharp-eared follower of the score might tut-tut, most of us were understandably swept along to Grimes’ terrible end which as an actor and singer he had come to embody. Sally Matthews as Ellen Orford had a squally night but her acting was spot on. In fact, this probably last WNO big production was an example of how well modern singers can act, particularly when a director like Melly Still guides them.

BBC Radio 3 will broadcast the production at some point but why weren’t the cameras of BBC Cymru or S4C rolling away? This Peter Grimes should have been opera as accessible television. Sarah Connolly as the bar-keeping “Auntie” and her customer base not only sang beautifully but in their early 1980s punk costumes brought out Britten’s point — lost in older productions where the Borough folk are so obviously from a different age — that ordinary people — always praised in words by their betters — are not naturally sensitive or tolerant.

Failing to bring this production to a TV or online public is a sad shame, whether penny-pinching or fearing to hold a mirror to the public is a loss not just to the “devolved nation” which may never see its like again.

The producer might not have intended to make populism such an obvious target, but because she was so skilled at integrating the crowd into the action — instead of letting them do the usual pointless chorus routines that just distract the audience — the result was something more powerful than just a musical drama.

Britten and Pears themselves were well aware that their own outsider status as conchies in wartime and widely rumoured gays meant that despite their left-wing views they were more likely to find acceptance in royal circles including among German princely houses like Hesse than among the British public that did not go to opera or concerts, nor listened to BBC relays — at least until the War Requiem broke the glass floor beneath them.

The cruel irony for WNO today is that the politico-grant-giving class from Cardiff to London talks bigly about providing the arts with “outreach to new audiences” while savagely cutting it back in practice. Welsh National Opera will no longer tour to Llandudno’s rather grand theatre in North Wales any more than it will to its old haunt on the Mersey at Lerpwl (Liverpool).

The Welsh government’s 20 mph speed limit and its general cut back to public transport has made it impossible for older and poorer audiences from the valleys, for instance, to get to and even more from Cardiff.

What was striking about the directorial duo’s impassioned post-performance call to arms to defend the arts was their failure to name names of the guilty arts bureaucrats who have effectively condemned opera to go the way of chapel in Wales. I didn’t see leading figures in Welsh politics there on opening night. Maybe they have decided that Welsh identity is no longer linked to being a “land of song” whether in theatres or places of worship, but some members of the audience detected the ghostly figure of Nicholas Serota, chairman of the Articidal English Arts Council which has also begun the slow motion assisted dying of professional opera in Wales.

Unlike Wigmore Hall, which can defy Arts Council dogmas thanks to London’s deep-pocketed donors, culture in Wales survives only through state subsidy. Passing an enormous scrap heap on the way into Cardiff on Saturday night felt like witnessing the funeral pyre of a nation in need of life support — but receiving only counselling, and soon not even the consolation of song.