Thnaks to Intermezzo, I have found a copy of the Royal Opera House accounts for the year to the end of August 2009.
To break it down, their total expenditure is £99.5 m, of which £7.5m is the cost of commercial and voluntary activities, leaving £92m to spend on opera and ballet.
Note 7 on page 24 breaks down expenditure into various categories, of which the main ones (in round millions of pounds) are:
Royal Opera 16
Royal Ballet 9
Orchestra 9
Production 10
Stage and Transport 10
Other production and sales costs 5
Management 2
Marketing & publicity 6
Education etc 3
Support costs 20
Staff numbers are
Production 395
Orchestra 114
Ballet 122
Opera 82
£9 million for 114 orchestra players and staff looks *about* right - in actual fact probably includes salaries and on-costs for 114 employed staff and fees for freelancers - £79k probably too much for an full-time orchestra player (please note the costs include Employers' NI & pension contribution as well as salary).
82 opera staff costing £200k each, so I presume that's 82 employed staff - chorus, young artists, and maybe a few assistant assistant conductors/rehearsal pianists, plus the fees paid to any number of visiting freelancers (I say any number, they're listed in the programmes, but I'm not counting now).
It's reasonable to assume that those are the salary and on-cost or fees for instrumentalists, dancers and singers.
395 staff for production at cost of £10 million suggests a cost of £25k, which doesn't strike me as very much (remember, not salary but full cost to employer). Let's hope a significant number are part-time!
£15 million of the support costs are premises related, and the rest are mainly 'management and administration', presumably including ushers, cleaners, cloakroom attendants etc
Scenery, costumes, animals etc are presumably what comes into Stage and Transport, all £10 million of it. Without seeing the budget/management accounts for a specific production it's difficult to conclude, but it doesn't seem excessive, depending on how many productions it represents and the extent to which the costs are shared with other houses - off the top of my head I can't remember which productions were new in 08/09 season.
I guess to some people, 65 managers and administrators may seem excessive, but it depends what they do. I presume they include people like Stage managers, lighting engineers, as well as HR, Legal, finance, media and all those myriad functions every sizeable organisation needs to have in house. I may of course be wrong.
Income includes £35m from box office sales, and £7 million from membership of the Village Hall Flower Arranging Committee Friends. That's quite striking - membership is a fifth of ticket sales.
It's difficult to know what to conclude.
There doesn't seem to be a great deal of fat in that budget. On the other hand, where I work there is an expectation of 25% reduction in frontline services, and a third in backroom support. Much as I love opera, I do think that most of the frontline services my department provides are far more important to the nation (although one may disagree vehemently about the politics behind the policies that drive the operations - and believe me, one does, although not being frontline, one meekly accepts one's position as low-down the food chain and thus expendable/not socially useful).
On the other hand, the budget is 100 times the size, so arguably has more scope for scaling down and finding efficiency savings - though not 25%!
Personally, I think there is a good argument for protecting small budgets such as Arts and Overseas Aid (the latter, the Coalition agrees with me) because enormous cuts to them make not one jot of difference to the overall national finance). But I always think that the ROH audience may contain a disproportionate number of extreme tax avoiders. (By extreme, I don't mean people who ensure they claim every business expense, use their full ISA allowance, etc, but people who create elaborate arrangements and subsidiaries whose only function is to avoid tax which would otherwise be due).
