by Musicians and performers at the English National Opera (ENO) who voted to strike said they were being used as “pawns” in a political game after some proposed cuts suggested they could be forced out of the profession altogether.
Union members at the ENO voted this week to take action in a dispute over planned cuts – which would see 19 orchestral jobs axed, all choral, orchestral and music staff made redundant and re-employed for six months, cutting 40 wages. %, and some employees on an independent ad hoc basis only.
The team will stop work on February 1, the opening night of the company’s production of The Handmaid’s Tale. If the strikes continue, the show is not expected to go ahead.
Glen Sheldon, the orchestra’s second violinist and conductor of the ENO’s Musicians, said many staff felt they had no choice but to strike over the organisation’s plans, which also included making Greater Manchester their new home.
He said the move had left many ENO musicians wondering whether or not they would have to leave the industry altogether.
“I’m 58,” Sheldon said. “I’ve been in this business for 36 years. I’ve been at the ENO for 23 years, I have to look very carefully to see if I can continue in this business, and it doesn’t look like I can.”
ENO choir member Ronald Nairne said: “We went out and campaigned with management, wrote letters to MPs, appealed to the Arts Council, cross-parliamentary groups and the DCMS. [Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport].
“We took it as far as it could go. And now they have decided on this business model.”
Sheldon said the musicians felt like “betrayals” in a political game that had developed since the then culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, directed Arts Council England. take £24m a year from London in late 2022.
This was followed by ACE’s decision to end all ENO funding and tell the 100-year-old institution that it must move outside of London if it is to be eligible for additional grants. Since then its musical director, Martyn Brabbins, has resigned in protest at job cuts.
Nairne said strikers felt solidarity with others across the country at stage stops, including junior doctors and railway workers.
“I don’t want to draw any false equivalence, but people have to be able to live and do their jobs to match the rising cost of living,” he said.
“A lot of people are in trouble now, and I think only certain leagues and companies and certain areas are affected by it. The people who choose their pay packages seem to be fine all the time.”
Sheldon added: “We’re not talking about life and death, like a junior doctor or holding capital like train drivers, [but] I feel like it’s part of what’s going on.”
Nairne and Sheldon were speaking on behalf of the orchestra as all musicians have clauses in their contracts that prevent them from speaking to the press unless they have express permission.
One ENO musician, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the proposed cuts would make it “absolutely unviable for me to stay there … it would mean I would lose my house – there is no way I could cover the shortfall”.
They said he was “extremely happy that it would be impossible, even at the top of this career in this excellent orchestra, to make ends meet … I would rather get work all year round for the pay living in London is what ENO is now offering.”
Another said: “I don’t believe those responsible for these cuts have any idea of the damage they will do to this company, the individuals who will be affected, and the industry as a whole.”
The ENO said on Wednesday that it would be best to resolve the dispute around the negotiating table.
He said that while he “respects the right of trade union members to take industrial action as part of our ongoing negotiations”, he was “disappointed that it means audiences will lose the opportunity to experience the work and talent of the ENO company on distance”.
Brabbins, who announced his resignation in October after the cuts were announced, said Thursday that he fully supports the orchestral and chorus musicians “in making what would be a heartbreaking decision, no doubt, to strike”.
He added: “As a result of Arts Council England’s narrow-minded and negligent decision to push ENO out of London, these wonderful musicians are destroying their livelihoods and causing great stress to their families.
“When is an opera company not an opera company? When music is no longer in his heart.
“This is the tragic reality that English National Opera will be in, if it goes ahead with the proposed plans to make deep and swift cuts to musicians’ contracts.”
Musical differences before ENO
The vote is the first time members of the Musicians’ Union have chosen to strike since 1980, and the last time ENO musicians struck 10 years earlier.
In 1970, just after the company moved from Sadler’s Wells to the Coliseum in London, workers demanded working conditions in line with the Royal Opera House – where staff had predictable work patterns and limited night work.
As the September production of Carmen was about to begin, the stage crew stopped work. The show was run by a skeleton crew and – according to Susie Gilbert’s ENO history, Opera for Everybody – this created a rift between staff, unions and management, leading to another strike in 1974. Reports an Arts Council committee into the chaos found that management was inexperienced in handling “major operations” and that they were generally “weak”.
There are later ruptures. In 2002, the ENO’s artistic director at the time, Nicholas Payne, resigned amid “talks of redundancy” and allegations of “artistic misjudgment”.
The following year there was another redundancies strike, no longer rumours, which halted the production of Berlioz’s The Trojans: The Capture of Troy, which cost the ENO a reported £50,000 in box office receipts.
During the dispute, choirs stood outside the Arts Council offices and sang The Hebrew Slave Choir from Verdi’s Nabucco and Protect Our Homes and Our Children from Khovanshchina, the Russian tragedy they were rehearsing when news of the redundancies broke. .
Sir Gerry Robinson, who was reorganizing the Arts Council by cutting 50% of its staff at the time, is said to have said it was “the most beautiful protest” he had ever heard.
