Bath on the brink
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
When Malcolm Muggeridge recalled the Manchester Guardian he had worked for in the early 1930s and wanted to illustrate its flavour of hand-wringing anguish, he would quote a leader with the sentence, ‘One is sometimes tempted to suspect that the Greeks do not really want a stable government.’ Anyone who covers cultural politics in this country must often be tempted to wonder whether the British really want ‘the arts’.
An endless litany of official philistinism and parsimony has been bad enough in London — see the tales of the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera passim — but what happens in the provinces is worse, as those of us who live there know too well. The fate of Scottish Opera in the past few years is an outrage which can only encourage the belief which many already held that the Scotch are unfitted for self-rule, with the absurd parliament and executive in Edinburgh deciding that Scotland had its own culture bagpipe music, football and deep-fried Mars bars — and didn’t want any filthy foreign muck written by people with silly names like Verdi and Wagner. Perhaps they were right.
But we in the West Country shouldn’t be too snooty. Bath is lucky enough to have two music festivals, the Bath International Festival for a fortnight at the end of May, and the week-long Mozartfest which has just begun. Each of these has a distinguished history and offers music of an extremely high standard. In a civilised country both would be cherished (in a civilised country, Bath itself, one of the most beautiful of all European cities, would not have been partly desecrated and befouled by ‘redevelopment’ in the 1960s and 1970s, though that’s another story).
As it is, neither festival is in the best of health, financially as opposed to artistically, and the Mozartfest is now teetering on the brink of collapse. It may have only two more years to run if alternative sources of income can’t be found. In the years I have been living in Bath this autumnal feast has been a constant delight, and if it should disappear, all for lack of no more than £50,000, it will be a very sombre indictment of what was once, but we hoped was no more, the Land Without Music.
The summer festival enjoyed one golden age when Michael Tippett invited William Glock to become director in 1975. For his ten seasons, Glock’s Bath Festival gave everything from Monteverdi and Handel to Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle by way of Haydn quartets and Mozart wind music. Glock was succeeded from 1986 to 1993 by Amelia Freedman, begetter of the Nash Ensemble more than 40 years ago, now head of classical music at the South Bank centre, passionate Arsenal supporter, and one of the central figures in English musical life.
In 1990 the Mozartfest (irritating name, but there we are) began in poignant circumstances. A lady called Mary Purnell wanted to make a benefaction in memory of her son Mark, who had loved Bath and had loved Mozart, and had died young. In its early years the festival had the good fortune to be run by Yehudi Menuhin, before Miss Freeman transferred from summer to autumn festival: this is her 11th year at the helm of the Mozartfest.
Because of her work in London, the great artists ‘all know me and they want to come to Bath’, she says, and that claim is amply illustrated by this year’s mouthwatering programme. It begins with two recitals by the Takács Quartet this Friday (11th) and Saturday (12th), and then there are the pianist Stephen Kovacevich, Bach cello suites played by Steven Isserlis, a sellout on Thursday (17th) for Felicity Lott and Ann Murray, all ending with The Creation (19th) conducted by Richard Hickox in Bath Abbey (wear something warm). The repertory is not esoteric, just central, and ‘Mozart is at the heart of the festival’, says the artistic director.
The very first notes heard in this festival will be the Mozart C major Quartet, the ‘Dissonance’; if only the festival weren’t opening on a dissonant note. To be sure there will be happy performers, grateful audiences, glowing notices. So how could such a wonderful event be under any threat at all? The answer is of course money. Although the Mozartfest does good box office, with about 80 per cent of seats sold, that doesn’t bring in more than a portion of the £360,000 the festival costs. Several private supporters lend a hand, among them the mysterious ‘Roper Challenge’ behind which one self-effacing patron of the arts shelters, and which matches any other donation. Then there is Mrs Purnell’s original legacy. Alas, as Miss Freedman explains, this has produced a paradoxical effect. Though generous at the time, the money she gave was never enough to support the festival in perpetuity, and is now at last dwindling away. And yet the very fact of the bequest is taken by both the Arts Council and the local authority, Bath and North-Eastern Somerset (Banes by acronym, and sometimes bane by nature), as an excuse for giving the Mozartfest no subsidy all. Venues in the city are provided at a discount, which helps, but is not enough. What’s needed — all that’s needed — is that 50 thou. Now have a look at the newspapers, and the sums our government spends on its other foibles and follies.
This piece is written in an uncharacteristically altruistic spirit, with no motive except to Support Your Local Festival, but it is also written with more indignation than usual. In the scheme of things, alongside Iraq, global warming and Aids in Africa, the survival of one quite small music festival may not seem to matter, but it matters to some of us very much.
Then, again, so do some football and cricket matches. I doubt whether Arsenal can overtake Chelsea, but Amelia Freedman was at Highbury last Saturday to see the Gunners wallop Sunderland, and they are playing brilliantly at present in the European competition. Maybe a little of their luck can rub off on the team’s most eminent musical fan.
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