26 September 2026 - 6:00pm
This week Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Left-wing Mayor, astonished his conservative critics by doing something they wish they’d thought of. He announced that the city is paying for 70,000 tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, to be given away in a lottery. “Every New Yorker should have the opportunity to sit in these seats, hear these voices and experience this stage, no matter what’s in their bank account,” he said.
Some Right-wingers complained about a waste of public money, but, really, it should be a source of embarrassment for conservatives that a self-proclaimed socialist thought up this scheme before they did. For decades, public bodies on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to make classical music “accessible” by moving the goalposts. The BBC parachutes Sam Smith into the Proms while turning Radio 3 presenters into gormless disc jockeys. Meanwhile, the musical establishment desperately tries to insert modestly talented female and ethnic-minority composers into the pantheon of the greats.
It hasn’t worked — and let’s not pretend that Mamdani’s lottery will achieve spectacular results. We won’t suddenly start hearing the Triumphal Chorus from Aida drowning out hip-hop on the streets of the Bronx. Realistically, Mamdani and his colleagues may convert a few thousand New Yorkers who would otherwise never have set foot in the Met, or heard anything more than a burst of “Nessun dorma” on a playlist. Even so, they will have achieved more than armies of arts administrators and music teachers, not to mention the conservative guardians of culture who deplore musical wokery.
Opera is one of the least accessible art forms for modern audiences and always will be; we should stop worrying about that fact of life and concentrate instead on introducing it to those people who would fall in love with it if they had the chance. The same is true of the more challenging classical symphonic repertoire.
This isn’t to say that the most popular operas or symphony concerts with tried-and-trusted programmes fail to sell tickets. But the whole ecosystem relies on snob appeal, corporate hospitality and public funds whose beneficiaries occupy the same narrow social stratum as the civil servants who allocate them.
The composition and performance of large-scale “art music”, for want of a better term, has required bucketloads of subsidy since the 16th century. Gradually, the burden has shifted from princely patrons to taxpayers, and that trend can’t be reversed. What the New York experiment does is open the turnstiles to taxpayers, bypassing bien-pensant gatekeepers. Although its effect may be limited, anything is preferable to the useless fantasies of progressive social engineers.
While conservatives should be embarrassed, we also need to ask why Mamdani was able to outsmart them. The answer is that they belong to a Western political class that is increasingly deaf to classical music, for a combination of reasons. Recent generations have, for the most part, received a musical education that is perfunctory, politicised or non-existent. Also, compared to previous generations of conservatives, they tend to be myopic policy wonks or self-obsessed mediocrities for whom Mahler’s Second Symphony doesn’t represent Resurrection so much as 80 wasted minutes that could have been spent pressing the flesh at a drinks party.
Am I exaggerating? Consider this: the last Conservative British prime minister who took a serious interest in music left office in 1975. That is, five years before the birth of the current leader of the party. Now, you may think that Kemi Badenoch is preferable to Edward Heath in almost every respect, but her eight musical choices on Desert Island Discs did not include a single piece of classical music. Perhaps Mamdani should offer her a free ticket to the Met.
