The penurious cavalier

The recent admission that the Centre for Creativity, known as St James Cavalier or its misleading Maltese name, Il-Kavallier ta' San Gakbu, is in financial straits comes as no surprise. Creativity and the arts come at a price, which is way above the niggardly Lm135,000 per annum the Cavalier receives.

Art has never been a priority on this government's agenda; neither this one, nor any before it. We are too poor a nation to keep a panis et circensis (bread and circuses) going and it is invariably all things cultural that are discarded whenever the Ministry of Finance is feeling the pinch; a case in point being Radio Bronja.

Minister Francis Zammit Dimech, when asked about the hapless Cavalier, declared he would be doing his utmost to ensure that "his baby" would survive and its present difficulties surmounted. Let's hope so.

Meanwhile, the cheese-paring continues. The comparison of Lm135,000 and the proposed Lm150,000 per annum subsidy to property prices today is an eye-opener. When one thinks that private individuals are able to spend even double that sum on an apartment one wonders where all our taxes are going.

What is doubly annoying is that the proposal to rebuild the former Royal Opera House site as a new House of Parliament has not been officially shelved or dust-binned as it should have been after the outcry it caused when it was announced.

If the government is unable to maintain St James Cavalier after only five years of its opening its doors, can anyone imagine the vast expense maintaining yet another cultural centre a stone's throw away? Just imagine if instead of a cultural centre the site had to be developed into a parliamentary building? We are talking about mere maintenance here not the horrendous cost of building it from scratch for something that is not being put up for the delectation of the public. The mind boggles.

During my time as a member to the Manoel Theatre Management Committee it was often preached by the various chairmen, doubtlessly echoing the minister in charge, that we should try to run the theatre at a profit, which is a pie in the sky. No theatre worth its salt runs at a profit, especially one like the Manoel, which has to be all things to all men.

We are in the situation where the unofficial national theatre, like it or hate it, remains the court theatre of the later grandmasters. Since the destruction of the Opera House, this tiny theatre has had to put up large plays, orchestral concerts, pantomime, musicals, ballets and opera that are way too large for its size when in actual fact it is the ideal venue for solo piano recitals, chamber music and anything, be it opera, oratorio, music or plays that were written or composed prior to the French Revolution.

The Conference Centre has proved to be an unpopular fallback as it simply does not lend itself atmospherically or acoustically to the full enjoyment of serious cultural fare. St James Cavalier does nothing to solve the problem either.

There was a time when the various cultural attachés of the main European embassies maintained a friendly rivalry and tried to outdo themselves as to the amount of lavish performances they procured and subsidised. That rivalry has disappeared along with their dwindling budgets.

There were memorable seasons with performances by Carla Fracci, Vladimir Ashkenazi, Tomas Vasary, Peter Katin, I Solisti Veneti and the American Quartet occurring all in the space of less than a month. In the summer, the Manoel used to put up opera (in the plural) en plein air on Manoel Island.

Today the MTMC struggles to put up two operas which it has the audacity to call an opera season. The separation (more like divorce) of the ci-devant Manoel Theatre Orchestra and its transformation into the National Orchestra has made the hiring of the orchestra by the unofficial national theatre too expensive. The result is that from an average of 12 orchestral concerts a season these have been reduced to about three or four if we are lucky; this without taking operas into consideration.

To get back to our quixotic Cavalier; to date it has hosted a number of exhibitions, notably the British Contemporary Art one and the Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti's Maltese Antique Furniture one, both of which were highly memorable for different reasons. Since then so far as I am aware there has been nothing of that calibre. We have had exhibitions by local contemporary artists and plays put up in the delightfully intimate Theatre in the Round but nothing really has taken me there apart from the showing of some artistic film. Not earth shattering stuff and not stuff to fill the Cavalier's empty coffers!

This is all very sad. While I am definitely against the Opera House site being used as a parliamentary building when an enormous fortress that would be an ideal site is falling into ruin at the tip of the Sceberras promontory, under the circumstances I simply cannot see it being made into either an opera house or a cultural centre either. On both a financial and pragmatic level this would be sheer folly.

While we spend millions of liri on a Dar Malta in Brussels and plan grandiose parliamentary buildings and pour money into what seems like a bottomless pit to get the new hospital ready, Valletta itself is in shambles. The Labour government had the foresight and good taste to repave Republic Street but since then nothing has been done and its state deteriorates daily. What other palace of a Head of State anywhere in the world has a major car park smack in front of it?

We are way into our second year of EU membership. Neighbouring Palermo has benefited substantially from EU subsidies and when one remembers what it looked like only a decade ago, barely recovered from WWII, and what it is looking like now with EU funded restoration going at full swing, I am at a loss as to why our very unique capital city is not restored and maintained as it should be.

We have debated long and bitterly about what should be and not be done in Valletta; the Cavalier itself was a point of great controversy when it was being built and yet nobody has attempted to seriously get to grips with the problem.

The Centro Storico of any town or city in neighbouring Italy is maintained like a gem; simply because the Italians know that tourism is the jam on their bread and butter. Despite the fact that economically tourism is our bread, let alone the condiment that go with it, our historical and architectural heritage has to survive as best it can. That is what is called killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and the sooner the government and the people of Malta realise it the better.

kzt@onvol.net