Opéra director: culture is as important as health care and is in crisis not because of Covid, but because of cuts

The director of theOpéra de Paris, Stéphane Lissner, has clear ideas about who are responsible for the current crisis in culture, and the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, according to him, has little to do with it: if anything, it has acted as a detonator for an explosive charge of problems that have existed for some time. That’s what he said in an interview with France Inter news agency reporters Nicolas Demorand and Léa Salamé.

“The current crisis,” Lissner argued, “reveals to us that the constant decrease in funding for culture that has been going on for twenty-five years has brought us to a situation that the virus has only revealed.” These are cuts, Lissner continued, “that over the last twenty-five years we have seen both from local governments and from the state. The current restrictions have meant that we are gradually disengaging on the issue, because culture is not a priority, since we are not moving in a logic of increasing productivity.”

Lissner speaks for an industry, the performing arts sector, that is perhaps the hardest hit by the crisis of all, and the problems will be felt even when it reopens. “Diversity, innovation, creativity,” he continued, “will gradually be replaced by a kind of globalization, commodification. A comparison can be made between hospitals and the opera house: the means are increasingly lacking, and there are no well-defined policies. There is a link between precarious workers and health workers, who are poorly paid and are also in a precarious situation.”

The recovery, for the theater and live music sector, will not be easy. Security protocols are currently being pondered, but these are measures that Lissner says are impossible to implement. “Impossible to get 2,700 people into a theater by enforcing security, impossible to distance the orchestra, to distance the choir. We will wait for a vaccine, a cure, or perhaps the disappearance of the virus: we must be optimistic,” said the Opéra director.

What would be needed, Lissner concluded, is “a well-defined cultural project, between the regions and the state,” because “culture is fundamental, like health care: it is a social cement, and it is a duty for our policymakers to support it.”

Pictured: Stéphane Lissner

Opéra director: culture is as important as health care and is in crisis not because of Covid, but because of cuts

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