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Tom Sutcliffe rues the demise of the critic
Opera is big in the German-speaking
world, with about €3.5 billion of subsidy
per year. In the UK it has to make do
with barely £100 million. However,
London now has some International
Opera Awards sponsored by Harry
Hyman’s Nexus Group (a wellestablished
property-owner and developer
within the worlds of private
health and education). The awards
themselves were started by John Allison,
music critic of the Sunday Telegraph and
editor of Opera magazine. The argument
for awards is that, with all their
razzmatazz, they aid marketing and
develop interest. But there are at least
three opera monthlies you can buy at
German railway stations. They have
opera; we have awards.
A few years back I was President of
the Critics’ Circle, whose Drama and
Film sections have long had their own
awards. In the Music section (of which I
was chair for a decade) it has proved
very hard to establish workable awards,
not least because the field of musical
performance and composition is so
broad and music critics do not all feed at
the same trough. Some critics only do
chamber music, or pianists, or opera;
others stick to contemporary music (like
the zany comedian Spike Milligan, who
often attended spikey London
Sinfonietta concerts at the Queen
Elizabeth Hall in the 1970s). Serious
music-loving is specialised, but the joy of
music is that expertise is not needed –
just responsive openness.
The future of opera and theatre in
our country requires a broad-based
pyramid of performances in different
places of inevitably varying quality and
character. How else will the executants
learn their craft? ‘Metropolitan’ is not
synonymous with best. Is there a best
quartet, or a best conductor? On the
Last Day will we discover who has been
the most important genius in the human
creation of poetry or music or paintings?
Is not the expectation of a hierarchy of
accomplishment totally missing the
point? Lend yourself to music, and the
ideas of which it consists turn out to
have implications and associations not
Talented musicians need
chances to be heard
all to do with aural texture. They feed
you by knitting together in the
imagination more than you thought
yourself capable of feeling.
Of course some performers and
artists are better than others. All forms
of culture are communally available.
Unlike food, all may be consumed
without being used up – for digestion is
the user’s imagination. Remember
Theseus’s immensely wise advice in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream (I played
Titania at 14: ‘with élan’, as a master
reviewing the play wrote) about the
Rude Mechanicals’ acting. It applies to
every form of human creativity. ‘The
best in this kind are but shadows and the
worst are no worse if imagination amend
them.’
Instead of all these prizes, what the
world of the performing arts really needs
is bigger audiences: crowds of spectators
with time, and sympathy, and inquisitiveness
to listen to and read and
witness all those non-winners pursuing
their careers and being paid for their
pains: in a local gallery, or in a church
where people will come together to
experience many different kinds of
revelation and stimulus, or in the type of
small bookshop which is vanishing from
all our lives because the evil wizards of
marketing have found shortcuts to
selling masses of only a few titles so that
only a few performers or writers or
creators will actually become rich and
famous. The public want to believe
simple truths about who’s good and
who’s not; and what’s worth reading or
not. But talented musicians need
chances to be heard. Those deemed best
will always be fine. Rather than prizes
that add nothing to native achievement,
however, what we need are rostra: not
building great careers for the few, but
sustaining a life of performances for the
very many with almost equal giftednesss.
The market-led dumbing-down of
the last 40 years is destroying our
humanity and range of interest and
sympathy. The many non-winners of
prizes need to be working and waiting to
be experienced and discovered; but
audiences for classical music have
radically declined in London. The
London Symphony Orchestra, which
easily used to sell out the Royal Festival
Hall’s 3000 seats, cannot now even sell
out the Barbican Hall at two-thirds the
size. The Festival Hall is an entertainment
centre nowadays, and its
great days as a shrine to music are long
forgotten. Newspapers and magazines
have stopped even talking about the
great musical masterpieces; and they no
longer have critics who can say anything
persuasive in the space allotted about
works that they think are too familiar,
but in fact are forgotten or unknown.
Nor can they bring anyone to drink this
nectar from the past. Either nobody is
interested, or perhaps they already know
enough.
The editor of the National Post in
Canada, whose distinguished music
critic has just resigned because his
review of the Canadian Opera Company
was altered to suit the company’s media
department, confessed ‘I really hate
running reviews for performing arts.
They simply get no attention online, and
almost always end up as our poorest
performing pieces of digital content.’ On
the Guardian website, ‘Music’ now
means pop and rock, and a separate
section called “Classical” includes opera.
Newspapers no longer have salaried
critics on the permanent staff. But can
freelance critics really identify with the
newspaper’s interest, or be seen by
editors as vital for the publication or
website to achieve full resonance?
The Daily Sketch, News Chronicle, and
Daily Mail (unpretentious papers for
ordinary folk) until the 1970s had music
critics on their staff on full salaries.
Today’s Guardian doesn’t, although The
Times has a few. I was a sub at the
Guardian; never a salaried critic. At the
Evening Standard I was a freelancer. The
climate of our culture has changed; and
a vast vital area of responsibility has
been disastrously abandoned. ND
June 2016 ■ newdirections ■ 27