It's not opera that's elitist but the idea that art is too complex for the working class

The myth that culture has not been for the masses is debunked in a new book

- Kenan Malik

“Opera and ballet will be at the heart of the culture of many people who live in London and the south of England,” former Conservative minister Jake Berry (now a member of Reform UK) once told parliament. “But for many of us in the north it is our local football club – our Glyndebourne, Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House or Royal Shakespeare Company will be Blackburn Rovers, Accrington Stanley, Barrow, Carlisle or Sunderland.”

Football is immensely important in many people's lives. Clubs play a huge role in the social life of small towns (not just in the north), providing both a sense of civic pride and a kind of collective hope or aspiration. Yet, the contrast between opera-loving southerners and football-worshipping northerners plays to some of the basest stereotypes about the working class and about culture.

Studies such as Jonathan Rose's magnificent The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and Edith Hall and Henry Stead’s equally exceptional A People’s History of Classics have revealed the hidden histories of the significance of music and literature to working-class lives.

Now, Alexandra Wilson’s new book, Someone Else's Music, unpicks the myth that opera is alien to the working class. For much of the past century, Wilson shows, opera was a hugely important thread in working-class lives. Writing in 1934, with Britain still in the grip of the Depression, the conductor John Barbirolli observed that when opera companies toured the country, ordinary people packed the pits but “the wealthier people ... are too often conspicuous by their absence”. “The British upper classes today,” he snorted, “have little use for culture of any kind.”