It was denial and hubris that got him in the end, general Varus in AD 9, who oversaw one of the worst Roman defeats ever recorded. The massacre, at the hands of the Germans in the Teutoburg Forest east of the Rhine Frontier, was gruesome. But it came to mean more than that: this wasn’t just a major loss that halted Roman imperial expansion, but a cosmic fight between civilisation and barbarism. That may be somewhat of an undergrad reading, but it was handy for propagandising at the time.
I was reading the historian Tacitus’s account of Teutoburg Forest while Oscar-hopeful Timothée Chalamet was making headline news. A clip of the actor was circulating: no one cares about opera or ballet any more, he said. He wants to work in movies – an art form that still attracts an audience. It’s an honest and brave thing to say.
In response? The opera and ballet “community” (dreadful word) lost their heads. They called the remarks “ineloquent”, “narrow-minded” and “reductive”. It was “disappointing” and didn’t he know there was “nothing more impressive than the magic of live theatre, ballet and opera?” This was all just evidence of his inexperience, they went on, his philistinism, his un-collegiate nature; Chalamet posed a danger to the profession.
Meanwhile, the performing arts are in precipitous, some say terminal, decline. Opera attendance is plummeting, its core audience slowly dying, and it’s much the same for ballet and classical music too. Were you to spend any time listening to the harpies above, however, you would struggle to realise it – such is the depth of the denial on display in the industry this week. If first you have to admit you have a problem then we are a long way from arresting the tailspin opera, ballet and the like find themselves in. And if these guys are supposed to be vanguards of the culture, then good luck to the culture – you are on your own out there.
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Call their denial tragic, or contemptuous; I do not think it is wrong to say it is dangerous. Remember, pretending everything was fine – and underestimating the threat – is what got Varus’s men chopped up by the Germans. Barbarism comes for civilisation when civilisation is resting on its laurels, or confidently lecturing Chalamet about his failure to appreciate the resilience of opera. “Despite drastic financial steps, Met Opera turns to lay-offs and cuts,” the New York Times reported this year. So deep is the crisis the organisation is considering selling two of its Chagall murals too. Resilience? Where?
[ Hot young celebrities are smoking and I’ve got mortifying middle-aged envyOpens in new window ]
The industry deserves some honest appraisal from its stars, not head-in-the-sand holier-than-thou pap. And forgive my naivety, but I thought cultural elites were supposed to defend their status, not will the total destruction of it. It’s important they do: not just for the preservation of ballet and opera and whatever for their own sakes, though that is a worthy goal too. But because cultural elitism and taste are ballasts to populism. Or as James Marriott put it in The Times of London: elitism is key to democracy’s survival. I suppose bigger thanks are in order for Chalamet’s candour than I initially priced in.
Take, for example, the media and this century’s worst invention: “the citizen journalist”. You could not host The Late Late Show if each week you rifled through a rolodex of conspiracy theories and barked them down the camera lens: anti-Vax this, Pizzagate that. You could have a million followers on X, however. Healthy media ecosystems rely on elite institutions, checks and balances, shareholder obligations, professional training and editorial standards. Or, as AA Gill joked to a room of student journalists in 2014, “you wouldn’t go to a citizen dentist.”
There are fuzzier reasons for defending taste and elite cultural pursuits. Literacy rates are associated with advancements in science and rights. Investment in ballet is proof of a society that cares about truth and beauty and all that guff. A citizenry that wants to spend a night at the opera will be – I am going to guess – a fraction more urbane than one that wants to watch MrBeast YouTube compilations in isolation.
Government cannot impose civilisation by fiat but the monstrously self-regarding snobs down at the opera and the ballet can will it from the bottom. But they can only do that so long as their enterprise is extant. And the first step is admitting you have a problem, no? Chalamet’s intervention ought to have been greeted with applause.
I come pointing out a serious problem, while bearing no real solution when it comes to halting the decline. Such is the privilege of the trade. But I do know this. The performing arts, the cultural elite, the literary universe and academe have to be honest about their condition – to us, yes, but to themselves first. Otherwise, just a few decades from now, a smug and patrician historian will come along with his knotty prose to say “well of course barbarism was going to win, we could all see it happening from here.”
