To begin with, two observations on classical music and money, separated by more than two centuries. The first dates from 4 April 1781. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – 25 years old and newly arrived in the imperial city of Vienna – writes to his father Leopold, back home in Salzburg, in words that bubble over with enthusiasm and youthful ambition:

I can assure you that this here is a magnificent place – and for my Métier the best place in the world. Anyone will tell you that. I like it here and am taking full advantage of everything as best I can. Believe me, it is my full intention to make as much money as I can; for after your health it’s the best thing you can have in life.

The second derives from personal recollection. A distinguished academic who had published research on the culture and practice of modern orchestras was interviewing me about the finances of orchestral touring. As a former orchestral manager, I had been recommended to him as someone who could speak from practical experience. His question came as such a surprise that I nearly laughed aloud. ‘Tell me’, he asked, ‘when a major orchestra tours in Europe, who takes the profits?’

The answer, of course, is that there are no profits. Steeped for decades in the internal culture of the classical music business, I was momentarily startled that anyone could imagine anything else. But it was a fair question. The classical music world works hard to present an image of affluence – from the white ties and tailcoats of its performers to the glossy jewellery advertisements in the pages of its programme books.

Audiences and the wider public perceive the art of classical music as a serenely gliding swan. I had been one of its frantic, paddling and invisible legs. Yet people have also been known to laugh out loud at that letter of Mozart’s. The surprise – the incongruity! – that this most sublime and universal of musicians should concern himself so enthusiastically with the getting of lucre! Yet Mozart’s entire career was concerned with securing a stable and substantial income. His failure to do so – though admittedly, his financial difficulties were more a matter of cashflow in a high-expenditure business – should give us some idea of the fundamental problem that this art form faces, and continues to face, in attempting to pay its own way, let alone turn a profit.

Money is rarely a comfortable subject for music-lovers. Since the Romantic era, many have even come to believe that cash is inimical to art. Yet musicians still need to eat, to sleep and to raise families. We may be approaching a point where widespread unawareness of the financial realities of classical music is now placing the art’s future at genuine risk. If those who love classical music wish to protect it, and to influence public policy in a way that will enable it to flourish, it can do no harm at all to be aware of the financial fundamentals that have shaped its history – and continue to define its future.

One fact, however, is inescapable. Western classical music, in its most advanced and complex forms – the symphony orchestra and opera – is, and always has been, expensive. Two examples from my own career in the United Kingdom – though far from definitive – give a rough sense of the costs involved. As of August 2024, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra employs 89 full-time, payrolled musicians. They are supported by 41 salaried administrative staff and eight music staff, with conductors and assistant conductors, typically engaged on a semi-freelance basis.

The costs of staging opera, meanwhile, can vary enormously. Again, sampling from what, in global terms, is probably the less lavish end of the spectrum: the July 2024 revival of Puccini’s Tosca at the Royal Opera House in London required two conductors and 10 principal singers, as well as nine non-singing actors, a chorus of 52 (salaried) singers, a children’s chorus (hired en bloc at an agreed fee), and an orchestra (again, salaried) of 92 musicians, as well as a stage and production crew numbering 63.

In short, to mount a single performance of Tosca required an irreducible minimum of more than 220 salaried individuals. This does not take into account approximately 90 administrative and management staff – from the CEO to the wigmakers, costume repairers and bar managers – or the costs of managing a sizeable public venue; manufacturing, storing and maintaining sets; costumes; and additional instruments – in the case of Tosca a peal of church bells is called for. Or even the hypoallergenic corn syrup that is used as stage blood.

Most of these individuals are highly skilled, highly qualified professionals. Classical performers are typically trained to the equivalent of doctoral level in their fields, and at this level of performance their physical stamina and prowess can fairly be compared to Olympic-level athletes – they are just as vulnerable to injury or strain. As with any elite professionals, their salaries reflect this.

In every case, therefore, putting a symphony orchestra on stage or mounting a fully staged opera incurs a substantial financial outlay. Some of this can be recouped through ticket sales. But far from all. The sold-out capacity of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden is 2,256 seats; Symphony Hall in Birmingham, one of Europe’s larger symphonic venues, seats 2,262. Even a sold-out concert can and often does make a loss, and there is little scope to change this. Classical music depends upon emotional intimacy and the communicative power of the unamplified instrument or human voice. Beyond a certain point, it can’t be scaled up without losing something fundamental to its nature.

And so, since the 17th century at least, classical music’s institutions have consistently been unable to survive in the long term in an unrestricted marketplace. Certain irreducible costs are intrinsic to the art form, costs which are not today – and for the most part, never have been – wholly recoverable from ticket sales. The art’s luxurious image is profoundly deceptive. I cannot think of a single permanent major orchestra or opera company, performing serious classical music in the world today, that can function without some form of subsidy.

In practice, this means that wherever there has been large-scale classical music open to a wide audience at affordable prices, there has almost always been subsidy in some form. Typically, this has come from the state, from monarchs or their more-or-less democratic successors – from private patrons, or from commercial firms practising corporate philanthropy. Throughout the art’s modern history – which is to say, since the birth of opera in northern Italy at the start of the 17th century – the same theme recurs like the first subject of a Mozart rondo. Without subsidy in some form, financial failure follows.

The first royal and aristocratic patrons, of course, lavished wealth on music in order to bolster their prestige and secure a measure of immortality. Perhaps they succeeded: when we think today of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua, we think primarily of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607). The Hungarian magnate Prince Nikolaus Esterházy (1714-90) was known in his lifetime as ‘the Magnificent’. Now, however, the Esterházys are best remembered for their five-decade employment of Joseph Haydn – who was effectively a salaried official of the Esterházy household, bound by contract to appear when summoned ‘in white stockings, white linen, powdered, and with either a queue or a wig’.

Even in societies with an emerging mercantile middle class, opera could only rarely be produced with the aid of financial subsidy. Seven dukes and six earls were among the subscribers to the Royal Academy of Music, the opera company that Georg Frideric Handel and a group of associates set up in London in 1719. It collapsed at the end of the 1728-29 season, overwhelmed by debt, and it was far from an isolated case.

Mozart was in many ways the forerunner of a new age. Having followed his father into a payrolled position at the court of the Archbishop of Salzburg, he sought – from 1781 – to make a career as a freelancer in Vienna. But he continued to push for a formal position at the imperial court and the financial stability that it conferred. The last year of his life, 1791, offers two strikingly different examples of his adaptability. The Singspiel of Die Zauberflöte was mass-market entertainment, composed as a profit-making venture for a suburban music hall. The opera seria of La Clemenza di Tito – premiered barely three weeks earlier in Prague – was a state commission: a solemn historical drama designed to glorify royal authority.

It’s tempting to reflect upon which of these two operas has proved more enduringly popular. The demands of public funders – whether a monarch insisting upon his due, or a national arts council demanding that respect be paid to multiculturalism or climate change – have a notably mixed record at inspiring art that audiences will actually pay to experience. And yet, the basic problem remains. Commercial opera companies and orchestras endured repeated cycles of boom and bust throughout the 19th century. Even Richard Wagner – the ultimate composer-as-idealist – occasionally bent to the market, rewriting Tannhäuser in 1861 for the Paris public.

Wagner subsidised Der Ring des Nibelungen through a mixture of royal patronage, most famously from King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and private crowdfunding via a network of international Wagner societies. Even so, the sums raised were barely adequate to the demands of opera on this unprecedented scale. Wagner’s bespoke Festspielhaus at Bayreuth was intended as a purely temporary structure. It stands to this day: Wagner’s wooden-framed provisional theatre is now a place of cultural pilgrimage, one that has required some €30 million in repairs since 2012. ‘When I was a boy, “opera” was a bad word in our house,’ remarked the Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, the son of an impresario, in 1954. ‘Opera was a way that people lost money.’

These are scattered examples, but they illustrate a wider trend across the Western world prior to the Second World War. How do matters stand now? It’s worth noting that the digital revolution has produced very limited benefits. Orchestral recordings are typically made for a one-off fee with no royalties payable to the orchestra, though, in any case, a commercial classical recording in the 21st century often sells no more than 2,000-5,000 copies globally. Digital saturation from free or ultra-cheap online recordings has stripped much of the value from recorded classical music.

Classical recording today is generally a prestige or legacy project for a multinational label, or a boutique product created on the smallest of margins. Almost no major performing company now relies upon significant income from recordings. That leaves live performance. In continental Europe there is an enduring tradition of generous state subsidy. In Germany, where the post-1870 state acquired the responsibilities of myriad smaller polities, each with its own capital and state opera and/or orchestra, there are still more than 80 subsidised opera houses and more than 70 state-funded orchestras. In France, where patronage historically flowed from the Bourbon court, the pre-eminent classical institutions are still symbols of state prestige. Since 1977, IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris has been a global centre of excellence for avant-garde classical music – though some have argued that under its long-serving director Pierre Boulez, it exercised a deadening effect on musical creativity in France beyond its favoured, state-funded clients.

Understandably, the European model is much liked by musicians, who enjoy regulated workloads, pensions, good salaries and high social standing. The negative side is less frequently discussed. Artists exist at the whim of political agendas and national budgets. Where there is no need to satisfy a paying audience, a creative ‘moral risk’ can set in, with opera directors indulging in obscure and alienating staging. Director-dominated opera, or regietheater, is frequently booed; in the United States it is routinely dismissed as ‘Eurotrash’. Alternatively, performance standards can decline into a mediocre routine.

The situation in the US is very different: with no inherited tradition of court or state patronage, and political hostility even to small levels of public art funding, classical music has depended heavily upon private philanthropy. In 2023, the endowment fund of the New York Metropolitan Opera (the Met) is believed to have stood at around $255 million; the Boston Symphony, in 2021, is estimated to have had an endowment of $456m. The autonomy and security that sums such as these confer is sometimes the source of envy among European observers – but here, too, it comes with a substantial downside.

Donors to US orchestras and opera companies frequently occupy governance positions, enabling them to influence and even dictate artistic choices. Endowment income, like any investment, fluctuates – since Covid-19, the Met has been drawing on its endowment capital at an alarming rate – and in any case, it’s rarely enough to guarantee absolute financial freedom. Ticket sales remain crucial, engendering a reluctance to take artistic risks. There’s no safety net and little political imperative to rescue a failing orchestra or opera company. While the ensembles at the top of the financial and reputational heap are among the wealthiest in the world, at least on paper, many smaller and less glamorous regional ensembles survive on a shoestring or, increasingly, fail to survive at all.

As for my own country, the UK , and its own performance culture – well, I used to consider it a happy medium, though recent cultural shifts and budget cuts that are, in fairness, part of a Europe-wide trend inspire rather less confidence. A typical UK symphony orchestra outside of London receives roughly 33 per cent of its annual income from public subsidy, with the balance made up – again, in roughly equal parts – by philanthropy, corporate and private, and by ticket sales. As a mixture, it has definite strengths: providing sufficient stability to allow long-term artistic planning and a measure of risk-taking, while still imposing an acute awareness of the tastes and preferences of the paying public. That necessary connection with a wider audience might, perhaps, be the reason why British composers such as Thomas Adès and George Benjamin – and opera directors such as David Pountney, Keith Warner and David McVicar – have found themselves in global demand.

UK state subsidy is sufficient (just) to provide a fertilising medium. The subsidised sector provides a pool of artists and administrators who can be drawn upon by entrepreneurial promoters such as the unsubsidised summer opera festivals at Glyndebourne, Garsington and Longborough, though these also rely upon high ticket prices and a formidable level of private philanthropy. The UK ’s postwar arts funding mix is not to all tastes, but historically it has provided a measure of security to artists without shielding them from the healthy discipline of the free market. That, of course, may be about to change, and not for the better.

Still, classical music has survived four centuries of social change and world history. ‘Good luck’s a slave that’s bought and sold / Oh, what a glorious thing is gold!’ sings Rocco the jailer in act I of Beethoven’s Fidelio (1814). A generation after Mozart, wealth had become a subject of slightly awkward mirth for serious artists – in an age of artistic heroes, only the low-born buffo-bass concerns himself with the sordid realities of the market. Two centuries on, the relationship between classical music and money remains both complex and alarmingly simple. Too much subsidy – whether wielded as a bludgeon or deployed as a security blanket – leads to bad art. But total exposure to the market leads to no art – at least, not in the ancient, expensive, fragile and infinitely beautiful form that we call Western classical music.

Clearly, financial subsidy remains essential. Equally necessary, however, is the spark that comes when an artist engages directly with a free, paying public with a mind of its own. Whether the achievements in question are Purcell’s theatre music, Corelli’s concertos, Handel’s oratorios, Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies, Schubert’s lieder, Verdi’s operas, Stravinsky’s ballets or the musicals of Gershwin and Bernstein, classical music has repeatedly been at its most vital, enduring and popular when setting out, to paraphrase Mozart, to ‘make as much money as it can’.

So, how to square that circle? The entire history of classical music has failed to answer this question in a single definitive form, and it’s quite possible that no answer exists. Meanwhile, in 2024, the obstacles to finding a solution seem greater than ever. Populism, political expediency, cultural insecurity and the sheer, overwhelming clout of mass culture in a digital age – any and all of these could overwhelm and destroy the fragile socio-cultural niche in which classical music and opera have, against all odds, survived and thrived.

The conclusion, then, is more of a warning cry than a summing-up. If we believe that classical music is one of the great joys of life – one of the supreme glories and rewards of Western civilisation – we should be aware that private individuals, philanthropic corporations and the state all have a role to play, and we should make policy accordingly. The balance is complex and often contradictory, but on one point, history is clear. Complacency is the greatest threat: classical music will not thrive unaided.

In the end it comes down to a simple question. Western classical music as a living art form – do we want it or not? If not, then that is, of course, our prerogative. I, for one, would be sad, while acknowledging that billions of people do indeed get through life very happily without it. But if we do want it, we need to pay for it. Culture this sophisticated must, by definition, be cultivated. And someone, after all, must provide the sunlight and the water.