Malta’s Artists Finally Get Pay Cheques: 42 Creatives Hired Full-Time in National Culture First

For the first time in Malta’s 5,000-year artistic story, painters, dancers, actors and musicians can wake up, clock-in and pay rent without waiting tables or scanning boarding passes.
After decades of precarious project contracts, the national arts companies – Teatru Manoel, Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, ŻfinMalta and the national dance school – have quietly converted 42 of their most regular freelancers into full-time employees, complete with €25,000–€32,000 base salaries, health cover and, crucially, a pension trajectory.

The shift, buried in the footnotes of last October’s Budget, became reality this month when the first payslips rolled out. For veteran violinist Rebecca Bonnici, 38, it meant cancelling the Ryanair cabin-crew interview she had pencilled for January. “I’ve played Vivaldi in the pit for 15 years while counting sick bags at 4 a.m.,” she laughs, waving her new permanent contract outside the Mediterranean Conference Centre. “Now I can finally hear my own kids practise scales.”

Culture Minister Owen Bonnici calls the move “the single biggest investment in human culture since Caravaggio was paid seven scudi to slash a canvas”. The €1.8 million annual wage bill is being bank-rolled by a re-allocation of Malta’s EU Recovery & Resilience funds, topped up with proceeds from the citizenship-by-investment programme – a detail that has already raised eyebrows in an election year. Still, the arithmetic is brutal but simple: 42 artists off the casual circuit equals 42 fewer rent-an-orchestra invoices, allowing companies to plan three-year repertoires instead of three-month scrambles.

Local context matters. Malta’s arts ecosystem has long been a triumph of passion over payroll. The island boasts one opera house per 68,000 residents – the densest ratio on earth – yet until last week every trumpet player in the national orchestra was technically self-employed, paid per rehearsal and denied maternity leave. Dancers from ŻfinMalta moonlighted as fitness instructors; actors hustled wedding MC gigs. The pandemic cancelled 412 performances overnight, exposing the fragility. A 2021 survey by Arts Council Malta found 73 % of creatives had considered emigrating, with Australia and Dubai the favoured escape hatches.

Enter the “Artist-as-Employee” experiment. Contracts are modelled on the UK’s BBC Orchestras template: 35-hour weeks, 25 days paid vacation, and rights to intellectual property generated in-house. In return, artists commit to 60 hours a year of outreach – workshops in schools, dementia wards and prisons. “We’re decolonising the idea that culture is a fireworks display for tourists,” says MPO CEO Sigmund Mifsud. “These players will coach 10-year-olds in Għargħur and stroke patients in Karin Grech.”

Early community ripple effects are visible. In Valletta’s Strait Street, once the red-light alley of sailors, the abandoned Catholic Action centre is being retro-fitted as the nation’s first Dance & Theatre Health Hub. ŻfinMalta dancers will offer free movement therapy to domestic-violence survivors every Tuesday morning, funded by a €50,000 bank levy diverted from record profits. “Art shouldn’t be the dessert of society; it’s the protein,” asserts choreographer Mavin Khoo, twirling barefoot across dusty parquet.

Sceptics warn the scheme could ossify into a state sinecure. “Permanent posts risk breeding complacency,” argues academic Dr Maria Cassar, who prefers a hybrid German system of tenure-track bursaries. Others question diversity: only three of the 42 new employees hail from Gozo, none are non-EU migrants. The musicians’ union is pushing for a transparent audition cycle every five years to avoid nepotism.

Yet for emerging talent, the psychological shift is seismic. Last Friday, 22-year-old saxophonist Leah Portelli from Żejtun became the first in her family to sign an open-ended contract before graduation. Her mother cried in the conservatory corridor. “I told mum I won’t need the €200 a month she saved from her cleaning job for my rent top-up,” Leah says, clutching her tenor like a life-raft. “She can finally fix our roof.”

As the sun sets over Grand Harbour, the Malta Philharmonic rehearses Mahler’s Resurrection. The timpani roll no longer echoes the anxiety of unpaid bills; it heralds a cultural resurrection of its own. Whether this bold wager on human creativity will deliver dividends of social cohesion, or merely swap one set of grievances for another, will depend on how boldly the artists now freed from economic survival embrace their next act: making Malta fall in love with its own reflection, one steady pay-cheque at a time.