The Royal Opera House is publicly funded - so why does it charge more than £100 per seat, asks Rosie Millard
In London, an early-evening injection of rigorous debate has become quite the thing, and this past week the Italian Institute was dissecting opera. Not the art form, but the financing. In the Italian corner was Antonio Cognata, general manager of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Sicily. He introduced himself by saying: "I am an economist." In the British corner was Elaine Padmore, director of opera at Covent Garden, whose rejoinder went something like: "I'm no good at figures, but I know a lot about music."
The night was chaired by Nicholas Payne, formerly of ENO, formerly of Covent Garden, currently of Opera Europa (a forum of more than 50 opera companies). He led us through a series of number-crunching comparisons. The figures made the audience at the institute gasp and roll their eyes. Not that Signor Cognata was lying; he was just telling it like it is.
The Teatro Massimo gets an annual government grant of 38.9m, or about £27m. Covent Garden's annual grant from the Arts Council is £23.1m - not remarkably different, particularly when you factor in the size of the Teatro, the largest opera house in Italy and the third-largest in Europe (behind Paris and Vienna). Compared to Covent Garden, however, the Teatro's private financing is poor: only 1m (£690,000), or 2 per cent of its annual income. Last year, Covent Garden managed to pull in £16m from corporate donations. The Teatro's box office is also pretty weedy - 2.4m (£1.7m), against Covent Garden's whopping £27.2m (2004-2005). But then it is far, far cheaper to go to the opera in Sicily. Top price at the Teatro is only 35 (£24): in other words, the Italian government subsidises each seat by roughly 192 (£132).
In contrast, the top price at Covent Garden this season is £180 (260), over seven times more. Why? It can't just be that orchestras and choruses in the UK are more expensive. Indeed, someone from Welsh National Opera in the audience leapt up and explained that they had managed to battle their top price down to just £35. Trying to explain Covent Garden's position, Padmore ran through the familiar arguments about the ballet school, the education programme and the cost of working in London. The Royal Opera House also puts on far more shows than its Italian counterpart: 300 per annum, compared to just 132 in Sicily.
Maybe, in the end, it is just not worth the hassle. Because it has been forced to shake the collecting tin so vigorously at the private sector, Covent Garden is clearly now in an uneasy position, straddling the Atlantic. Like its European equals, it has a great annual grant from the government, but, like any first-class opera company in America, it also relies heavily on favours from the corporate sector. Which means that every night at the Opera House, the well-upholstered behinds of City donors are sitting on the best seats, which have been partially funded by the taxpayer. And although those donors are also taxpayers, it somehow grates that a publicly funded institution is essentially reserving its most glittering glitter for people who can cough up more than £100 per seat.
Wouldn't it just be easier to let the Arts Council put its £23m somewhere else, and let Covent Garden go the whole hog down the corporate route, with perhaps a tax incentive chucked in along the way to help the medicine go down?
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