Opera is often derided by some on the left as "bourgeois entertainment" and nothing that socialists should have anything to do with.  Indeed, I remember precisely those comments from some SSP members when I managed to get a full commitment to Scottish Opera into the manifesto for the 2003 election. What some comrades complain about is the popular misconception of rich opera goers at Covent Garden paying £180 for their seats - or more likely getting someone else to pay for their seats! However, I attend Covent Garden regularly and never pay more than £10 a seat, as many others do. I also will be at all the operas at the Edinburgh Festival and never paying more than £10 a seat. This is half what the average football supporter pays on a Saturday afternoon for 90 minutes of often indifferent football (certainly if, like me, you are a Hibs supporter!).

Secondly they complain about subsidies from taxpayers to opera. True, opera is subsidised as are all the arts and libraries and education - and indeed, what kind of society would it be if we did not subsidise the arts?  Of course, the level of subsidy to the arts in Scotland is far too small and we in Solidarity proposed a doubling of the arts budget in Scotland and even that would compare badly with most European countries.  Scottish Opera gets £7 million a year - sounds a lot but opera is a very expensive art form with a full time orchestra, stage company and chorus as well as singers, conductors, designers etc. For this we get 4-6 full scale operas a year staged in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness. In addition, small touring companies go round 30 smaller venues and education and community teams take opera to schools, prisons etc. Denmark, a country the same size as Scotland with little natural resources funds 3 opera companies and four opera houses, putting on more than 30 operas a year. How can they do that? The answer of course is progressive taxation of up to 67% on the rich which funds not only a healthy arts budget but a high level of public services, and only 2% of their citizens in poverty.

So opera is not necessarily a bourgeois art form in terms of attendance, but what about content?

Again, the cliché is that opera is all about fat women and men screaming about their lost love or dying of consumption. Well, of course there are some operas which look like that on the surface but if you actually attend the opera - particularly at a live performance - you will find that the dramatic and musical reality are compelling. I defy anyone not be moved by the death scenes in La Traviata by Verdi, or Puccini’s La Boheme.

Opera can also be very political. For example, Verdi was a great figure in Italian nationalism and his operas were often thinly disguised calls to arms for creating the new Italy. Mozart wrote some very subversive operas  - The Marriage of Figaro for example was based on a play by Beaumarchais, which was banned for years because it asserted the rights of servants against the interest of their  masters. Also opera houses have often proved to be crucial in periods of revolutionary change, for the example La Monnaie, the Brussels opera house, staged an opera about Belgian nationality in 1829.which so inflamed the audience that they left the theatre and rioted afterwards and this led to the setting up of Belgium. In the velvet revolutions of Czechoslovakia and East Germany the opera houses of Prague and Dresden were the centres of the revolutions.  I have just been to the opening of the Edinburgh Festival whose opening concert was the opera  by the great German socialists  Brecht and Weill, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany. This opera is a savage attack on the greed of capitalism and how it ruins people’s lives and countries. On the  morning of the opening  night we saw the report that the Bank of Scotland had lost £7  billion in the credit crunch, so clearly  the Festival’s choice of an opening opera was appropriate!

However, opera is perhaps at its most political with the works of Richard Wagner - a composer often derided as a fascist, whose operas were much admired by Adolf Hitler, and until recently was banned from performance in Israel.  Was Wagner a fascist? I don’t think so.  Certainly by the end of his life he was a reactionary old anti-semite, but then anti-semitism was largely the norm for Europe of the nineteenth century. In fact, in his early life Wagner was a revolutionary. In 1848 he was chairman of the revolutionary committee in Dresden and after the failure of the German revolution he had to flee Germany to avoid imprisonment.

Wagner’s great work, and perhaps the most political work of all time, is his epic Ring Cycle. 16 hours of wonderful music and drama staged over 4 nights, it is loosely based on Norse sagas but updated by Wagner on the theme of the downfall of the gods through greed, power and corruption and the redeeming power of love. Since first staged by Wagner in Bayreuth in 1874 it has constantly been produced and reinterpreted over the years. For the most accessible introduction to the Ring borrow the DVD of the 1980 production from Bayreuth produced by Patrice Chereau, conducted by Pierre Boulez and superbly filmed by Brian Large.  If your local library doesn’t have it Solidarity members can borrow it from me. This is a very political interpretation set in the industrial revolution and clearly is a commentary on capitalism.

Scottish Opera some years ago produced a very good Ring Cycle which focused on domestic violence and the oppression of women. Incidentally, this production ran Scottish Opera into deficit and the Labour Executive closed them down for a year to pay off their deficit. As I said in an article at the time it was a bit like the US general in Vietnam who said "we had to destroy the village to save it from communism"! I organised a cross party campaign to try and save Scottish Opera however the Labour MSPs were spineless as usual and even those who I saw at the opera - usually on free tickets - refused to sign the motion, saying "our focus groups say opera is an elite art form". Incidentally, this was also the view of one SSP MSP who - despite the fact it was party policy -refused to sign the motion. I will leave you to guess who she was!
                      

Two years ago I attended a new feminist interpretation of the Ring in Copenhagen where all the women were strong and all the men were dodgy politicians. In the final scene, Brunhilde, the heroic woman lead who had been heavily pregnant in the final act (not at all in the libretto!) walked across the stage with a live baby in her arms as Wagner’s wonderful redemption music played and as Valhalla,  the home of the gods,  was consumed by flames.  (Incidentally, the baby belonged to a stage hand who had given birth some 4 months before.  The director said "well if it cries it shows it is real"!) I was reviewing it for Opera magazine and sitting in front of me was Michael Portillo, the ex Tory cabinet minister who ironically was reviewing it for the New Statesman. I could see him grimacing at this scene and afterwards discovered it was a concept too far for him. I explained to him the links between the personal and the political in feminism and to be fair in his review he seemed to have taken it on board. Ironically, he had just been sacked from the New Statesman by the new female arts editor so he ended his review his final article for the New Statesman by saying "after this opera I can truly say that women are taking over the world"!
                       

So to Solidarity members and all DGS readers I can say opera is not an ‘elite art form’. If you go to Verona in Italy where they stage wonderful operatic spectacles in the old Roman Arena with 15,000 Italians drinking their beer and sandwiches it is clearly the music of the people. It is also - when done well - I would argue, the greatest art form in the world, wonderful music, superb singing from great young singers, great choruses, much more dramatically convincing than it used to be, fine orchestras and very interesting productions, often highly relevant to our life today

It is in the real sense of the world, life enhancing, and no nation worthy of its name should be without a properly funded opera company - after all in Germany they have over 80! Finally if you would like to see Wagner’s Ring in a relatively cheap way I can recommend Budapest where in June this year I attended the premiere of a new Ring Cycle. It was a superb semi staged production using the latest digital technology for back projection and puppets and other devices. It was also very well cast and with a very good orchestra - and affordable (very good tickets for 2 of us for 4 performance i.e. 8 tickets for less than £100). Budapest is also a lovely city and only £50 return from Prestwick with cheap accommodation available.

There are 2 Ring Cycles next June in Budapest and you might see me there!  If you want to read more about opera and politics, can I recommend Viva La Liberta by Anthony Arblaster?
                                                             

Hugh Kerr