The need to bet big in the funding game of chance

Opera 2005/Michael Dervan: This year was a most unusual year for Irish opera. There were major new operatic presences north and south.

Cork witnessed the first, strongly musically-led productions by Opera 2005, and Belfast had its first visit from Leeds-based Opera North, replacing the annual performances by Welsh National Opera.

Opera Theatre Company's new artistic director, Annilese Miskimmon, showed her colours in a lively updating of Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea. David Agler won praise for a solid first Wexford Festival, which took place in the most difficult of circumstances, following the sudden tragic death of the festival's chief executive, Jerome Hynes, just a month before the festival started. Wexford now faces into its €30 million redevelopment of the Theatre Royal without the guiding hand of the man who planned and steered the festival's remarkable development since 1988.

An opera by an Irish composer became a major talking point in Ireland in May, when the RTÉ NSO gave the concert premiere of Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at the NCH, and in Britain in September, when English National Opera gave the stage premiere at the Coliseum in London. Barry had a remarkable operatic year. RTÉ issued the concert premiere on CD in advance of ENO's first night. And the same week the NMC label issued his first opera, The Intelligence Park, from a BBC recording of 1990.

The really big excitement about opera in Ireland should, of course, have been elsewhere. The Arts Council set up an opera working group, and charged it with recommending a future path for the development of opera by considering "Key Options for Opera in Ireland". Two major options were inspected by the group. The first, costed at around €4.6 million, would see a broad upgrading of the kind of provision that currently exists. The other was aimed rather differently, focused on the development of a national company of some sort, and with a far higher price tag of €8 million. The group was free to recommend either or neither. The council's opera budget in 2005 amounted to €2.79 million.

Standing back from it all, I would have thought it was a no-brainer. Opera is an expensive art form to present. So, given a choice between €4.6 million or €8 million, which would seem a better long-term bet on facilitating the development of opera in Ireland? Call the Arts Council's bluff. State the obvious. Opera in Ireland needs more money. Lots of it. Taking the two options as real-life options, the proper course of action was clear. Get the money into the sector first, sort out the fine print later. This, after all, is the ploy behind the council's current traditional arts policy.

The opera group outcome should have been predictable, I suppose. The group behaved like one of those mesmerized contestants on The Weakest Link, offering "Franz Ferdinand?" with a fading, upward inflection as the answer to "Who wrote Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?" But the fun and games hasn't stopped there.

The council's policy director, Séamus Crimmins, has written to everyone who was involved in the group's consultations. The letter reveals that the council "supports the notion of a lyric theatre in Dublin". It also "supports the view that openness and clarity are essential for good relations between Council and both funded and non-funded organisations", and believes that "organisations should be encouraged to pursue a shared approach to ventures in which they all have an interest".

My, my! The council "would like to see north/south production and touring collaborations" and is to request a paper "to see how best to advance the creation of an opera studio" with a possible Arts Council of Northern Ireland tie-in, even though the preferred location appears to be Limerick.

And what about the bottom line? The council members, I kid you not, "decided that while prioritising opera in 2006 would be desirable, no commitment to do so could be made without full knowledge of our 2006 funding and the level of 2006 demand in opera. Council was also reluctant to forward commit for 2007 at this stage."

The only extra commitment as a result of the working group having considered carrots of up to €8 million is €250,000 "for opera projects in 2006". It's as high-handed as asking a successful contestant on a quiz show to choose a prize, and then saying, "Oh, no. You can't have that one."

Basically, the opera group seems to have got its recommendation half right. Although it was one of the two major options they were asked to consider, they just knew they'd never get the €8 million. Myself, I still think they should have gone for it, if only to stitch into the record that it's the closer of the options to what is really needed. So they prudently chose the lesser option. And the council's response is tantamount to saying, "Don't be silly. We were never really thinking about giving you that anyway."

If the Arts Council remains as tight as this about opera, we're surely heading into a difficult future. The 2006 Wexford Festival will be a seriously trimmed-back affair, as the builders work on the Theatre Royal in High Street. Cork's new Opera 2005 will surely bite the dust unless the council is brave enough to throw it a lifeline.

Opera Ireland is still stuttering and fumbling artistically, as Dieter Kaegi seems to have run out of ideas that he can adequately implement with any degree of acceptable consistency.

Eight years ago, the then music officer of the Arts Council explained in a Letter to the Editor in this newspaper that the "existing stagnant situation" regarding the performance of contemporary music would not change until the contemporary music scene itself produced "its own passionate advocates or 'champions' ". There have been many upheavals in the Art Council since then. But the same outlook, I suspect, is now exactly what's being applied to opera here.

Highs & Lows

High

Gerald Barry's outrageously brash, black and witty The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant put Irish opera in the limelight, at home and abroad, as never before.

Low

Yet another seriously misfiring season at the Gaiety this winter suggests it's surely time for a change of artistic direction at Opera Ireland.