I worry that one of the casualties of the recent funding crisis in UK music will inevitably be new opera creation. Traditionally the poorly resourced cousin of the historic canon, the swingeing cuts to our major opera companies are likely to lead to more risk-averse programming, with audience-friendly classics, rather than cutting-edge new main-stage opera. It will also mean (for now) less money for the development of new work, which our national companies cannot currently prioritise. As someone working in Higher Education, I see first-hand the incredible talent there is among our young composers, and I am concerned that once they leave, instead of being able to capitalise on the buzz of interest that used to greet early-career composers, there will be little opportunity for them to showcase their skills in the professional realm. 

Despite the elitist slur often levelled at opera, it’s not the word that springs to mind when you work with highly talented young composers, who are plunging themselves into debt to pursue their creativity through music. This is a passion, a vocation, and without these composers coming through, there is no long-term future for new opera creation, either in a chamber format or on a grand scale. The external development showcases that used to exist, like the Jerwood Opera Writing courses at Britten Pears Arts, are no more. The ground-breaking Guildhall-ROH collaborative PhD which nurtured Philip Venables has also bitten the dust. Smaller companies like Mahogany Opera and Tête à Tête do offer development opportunities for young artists. Festivals are also running young composer schemes – JAM on the Marsh Festival has a free residential opera-writing scheme this year, and Buxton International Festival is about to announce Shorts, their exciting new opera commissioning and development scheme for 2025.  

However, organisations like these cannot plug the gap on their own, and while there are still some new writing opportunities with our bigger opera companies – Glyndebourne’s Balancing the Score, ROH’s Engender, Scottish Opera’s commissioning circle – they can only reach a handful of composers. This lack of external opportunities means there are now few platforms for commissioners and Artistic Directors to find the next great opera composers. On the erstwhile Jerwood opera-writing scheme, the two years I was involved as a singer produced a plethora of artists now working internationally, including opera composers Huang Ruo and Luke Styles, and opera directors Ted Huffman and Tom Creed. Creative schemes like this really can be the springboard into an opera career, but it is not easy to think of a comparable UK platform for young artists today. 

The Royal College of Music collaborates every two years with Tête à Tête’s Bill Bankes-Jones on new opera scenes, with Revolutions being this year's initiative

Given the dearth of initiatives for early-stage opera composers, we need an alternative approach to showcasing talent – the opportunity for this lies within our conservatoires. Over the last years there has been an explosion of new opera creation in higher education. Staging new expressions of opera within the educational environment gives composers the freedom to explore their art form, relatively risk-free. There are no commissions to be found, no singers or instrumentalists to pay. There is the license to express, and to experiment, without high stakes.

As examples of the richness of the conservatoire offering, The Guildhall’s Opera Writing MA has been going for over a decade now, pairing composers and librettists who work towards a final performance platform. The Royal College of Music collaborates every two years with Tête à Tête’s Bill Bankes-Jones on new opera scenes. This year it has ramped up its offering with its 'Revolutions' initiative, including six brand new short operas as their main stage work for the term (one of which I’m collaborating on with composer and RCM student Jasper Dommett).

'Nurturing an ongoing dialogue between industry and higher education is part of the key to supporting the next generation of opera makers'

In my role in Artist Development at the Royal Academy of Music, I am currently involved in three different schemes involving new opera creation: Opera Lab – our partnership with Stephen Langridge at Glyndebourne, the composition department’s Opera Maker scheme with composer David Sawer, and the Students Create festival, which has unleashed huge operatic ambition, including a fully staged piece with thirty-seven piece band and, this year, a bold new work exploring gender and sexuality through the prism of a gay cult. Pieces from these schemes have gone straight to the Tête à Tête Festival, providing a further platform and a paying audience. 

Far from being dejected, the young opera composers I work with – both at the Academy and professionally – demonstrate a humbling level of enthusiasm, knowledge and drive to make work. They are collaborating with writers to create fresh, imaginative and hybrid forms of sung theatre through the prism of their personal and political identities – work rooted in what really matters to them. Jasper Dommett’s new opera, Fanny and Stella’s Last Day Out, for example, reaches back into the Victorian era to tell the story of two exuberant female impersonators at the centre of a moral panic almost identical to the hysteria around trans people today.  

If we play this right, we have the opportunity to bring a new, younger audience to our art form, not through any desperate PR attempt to attract youth, but because the work these composers are making speaks to their own generation, as well as being of the highest quality. It is time for the profession to come into the Academy – to routinely attend the new works they are invited to, to talk to the young opera-makers, to offer advice, and to talent scout. Nurturing an ongoing dialogue between industry and higher education is part of the key to supporting the next generation of opera makers, because it is where most of the work is now being made. Of course, this strategy doesn’t even begin to reach the young artists who cannot risk the debt of a composition degree - the subject of another, and longer piece – but it is a practical start for the future of new opera creation.  

Dr Jessica Walker is a singer and librettist and works as Senior Lecturer and Lead in Artist Development Royal Academy of Music | www.jessicawalker.net

Jasper Dommett and Jessica Walker's new opera Fanny and Stella’s Last Day Out is part of the RCM Revolutions project at the Britten Theatre on 24, 26 and 28 June | rcm.ac.uk