Opera UK: a new hub for opera makers

Of all the art forms, opera is supreme at representing life’s agonies and ecstasies, and yet, curiously, it has never been good at talking about its own travails and triumphs. Who in the UK speaks for opera? Who promotes the art form? Who champions its cause? Who thinks about its future? Surprisingly, the UK has never had one single body to tackle those tasks – until now. Step forward, Opera UK.

Britain is home to some of the world’s leading opera companies, directors, designers, conductors, singers, instrumentalists and technicians. Opera UK aims to represent them all, and 'to future-proof opera', in the words of Genevieve Raghu, artistic director of Into Opera and a founder director of Opera UK.

It’s perhaps telling that no one appears to know just how much money opera in the UK generates every year. We know that all music contributed £5.2 billion to the British economy in 2018, but simple research reveals that neither the Department for Culture, Media and Sport nor the Confederation of Creative Industries keeps figures for opera alone. The data simply isn’t there: proof enough surely of the need for an organisation to collect vital information and fight for the sector’s future.

Such an organisation has been talked about for years, but it took the Covid shutdown to reveal the urgent requirement to make it happen. Last autumn, Raghu and a small group of industry insiders formed Opera UK. They invited hundreds working right across the sector to join them in shaping a body that could represent them all.

Anyone professionally involved in opera can join for as little as £3. More than 300 individuals and 41 opera companies large, medium and small signed up, including the Royal Opera, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera.

Answers to a questionnaire helped the founders devise a series of five online workshops, designed to define key areas that needed tackling. These ranged across collaboration in shaping opera’s future; how to adapt to change in uncertain times; how to advocate for opera; how to increase inclusion and accessibility; and how to change the way opera professionals work with each other in future.

The response was enthusiastic, with 70 to 80 participants in each workshop, split into breakout areas to talk detail, combining both practical ideas with some blue-sky thinking. 'What was extraordinary to watch was the opportunity it afforded people to sit down with those they would rarely get a chance to talk to,' said founder director Michael Harper, of the Royal Northern College of Music. 'The CEO of a big opera company would be sharing ideas with a costume-maker or a technician, a young singer or designer.'

Michael Harper, founder director Opera UK, principal study vocal tutor, Royal Northern College Of Music

It was all part of the directors’ mission to get the sector talking, and establishing Opera UK as the main hub for communication within the art form, a 'one-stop shop' for all things opera and a space where discussion can be transformed into concrete action.

Henry Little, CEO of Opera Rara and chairman of the National Opera Coordinating Committee, is also a founder director. 'We have been talking for years of the need to have a single sector organisation to promote a culture of cooperation and coordination and champion the extraordinary work that goes on in the sector. We’ve never had a platform that could be genuinely representative of everybody who works in opera: everyone has an equally valid voice and an equal contribution to make.'

He says that after the workshops Opera UK must move from listening mode to action and response mode: identifying the areas where change and improvement can be made quickly and reserving others for long-term discussion and research. In all, the founder directors have notes from 68 separate online discussions to distill, with the help of professional administrator Louise Greener and a battalion of currently furloughed volunteers. They have given themselves a deadline of 1 July to announce a set of actions that they hope will begin to improve the health of opera in the UK and help to ensure its long-term sustainability. 

They are reluctant to identify any areas just yet where they think they can act quickly and build momentum but say common themes are emerging, as well as questions about the nature of the organisation. 'To what extend will we be an advocacy organisation? What is its role as a champion? How does it fulfil that role? Does it make arguments to politicians; does it run media campaigns? Answers to all these questions will dictate what kind of organisation we need to be,' says Little.

With fellow director Emily Gottlieb, CEO of the National Opera Studio, Little had spent two years talking to the UK’s large-scale opera companies. 'They are the big employers, so we needed to have them on board,' he said, adding that they quickly saw the value of the project and helped provide some seed funding. 'They understood the notion that it had to be about everybody, not a clique for the larger companies. Opera America, which does great work in the US, started 50 years ago as a companies organisation but is now open to anyone in the business. Here in the UK, we wanted to bring the whole sector together from the very beginning.'

Vast quantities of information had come from the roundtables, says Michael Harper, not all of it encouraging. 'It’s clear that there some areas in which the opera industry is not well. There are places where we need to do a bit of surgery to repair some organs so that we are ready for something like this pandemic in the future.' He also stresses that Opera UK should offer practical help, such as advice to those starting out in opera. 'A young singer might want to know how to find an agent, for instance. Having information of that sort in one place would be so useful.'

Director Nicola Candlish, CEO of British Youth Opera (pictured above), sums up the aims of Opera UK, stressing it was not just a response to the here-and-now. 'What do we do about the future of opera? Everybody thought they were out there on their own, but if we want this industry to survive we have to work together.'

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