The Arts Council ’s Pursuit of ‘Grand Opera ’

Abstract

Abstract It will be the first task of Fascism in the cultural plane to elevate the public taste by releasing the national culture from the tyranny of commercial standards. Gone is the old aristocracy, which in the 18th century-to their honour! patronised such men as Dryden, Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Fascism must take over this duty of patronage, and with as generous a hand. Poor old English opera. For so long the play-ground of amateurs and dabblers. By drawing heavily on an article in the Fascist Week in support of his call for a British Ministry of Fine Arts, Henry Welsh added an unexpected voice to a then familiar argument. Where successive governments had ignored the value of British arts, Fascism could offer Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, with his assured cultural pedigree. Where Viscount Snowden ( ‘with whom we have little in common ’) had failed in his attempt to fund grand opera in England in the early 1930s, the ‘Fascist scorpion will be more grievous than the Snowden whip, and the Philistines will be belaboured into building for us one of the finest opera houses in the world ’. The year 1934-in which talk of Fascism infiltrated the bucolic pages of the Musical Times-was in fact Fascism ‘s ‘Indian Summer ’ in Britain; events in Spain only two years later were to turn public opinion against the Fascist cause, its doctrine largely discredited. Significantly, the extreme right ’s advocacy of a British Ministry of Fine Arts, balanced on the left by Communism ’s ‘Art for the People ’, helped to keep the argument for state patronage beyond the pale of mainstream politics.