Can English National Opera be saved?
As ENO celebrates 50 years at the ‘Coli’, Rupert Christiansen recalls the many remarkable productions he’s caught there
Barely out of short trousers and still reliant on pocket money, I spent most of the momentous day of August 21 1968 mooching round the National Gallery. In the afternoon, the newspaper hoardings proclaimed the appalling Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and I remember thinking: “Martin Luther King assassinated, riots all over the place, a student revolution in Paris, and now this. It must be the beginning of World War Three.”
But callow child that I was, something else was uppermost on my mind. I’d come up from the suburbs to queue for a day seat for the opening night of a new production of Don Giovanni at the London Coliseum. It would be presented by what was then called Sadler’s Wells Opera, an organisation that was abandoning its home in Islington’s Rosebery Avenue to take a lease on what was originally conceived as an Edwardian variety theatre and had ended up converted into a cavernous cinema.
The move was seen as temporary – an expedient experiment – in the wake of the collapse of a scheme to build a new opera house on the South Bank, alongside what would soon become the National Theatre. Undeterred, the management felt that the time had come to up sticks and leave the cramped, mouldy and outlying Sadler’s Wells (since demolished and happily rebuilt) for pastures new in the West End – an ambition made more urgent by the triumph of a production of The Meistersingers of Nuremberg, magisterially conducted by Reginald Goodall, a reclusive figure who, until then, was lurking in the backroom.
This unsuspected genius clearly needed room to spread his Wagnerian wings and Sadler’s Wells Opera felt bullishly confident that, given a larger auditorium and stage, it could grow its audience and broaden its artistic scope – keeping on file the thought that an arts-promoting government at some point would wave its wand and a purpose-built opera house would materialise. Disastrously, it never has.
I knew little of this, but my fate was sealed. Nurtured by a musically minded schoolteacher with whom I was infatuated, I had fallen helpless victim to the spell of opera. Forget the 1966 World Cup, Woodstock or The Man from UNCLE, this crazy art form had invaded my bloodstream and I would stop at nothing to satisfy what has remained a lifetime’s addiction.
My expectations for Don Giovanni were unreasonably high, I admit. I had been listening compulsively to the unsurpassed Giulini recording starring Joan Sutherland and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and my pompous adolescent diary records that I found the singing at the Coliseum distinctly rough-edged and under-projected in comparison. I could sense some bravado in the sparely elegant designs of a young man called Derek Jarman, but there was no sex or drama in the limp staging directed by Sir John Gielgud (a famous anecdote relates how in rehearsal, an exasperated Gielgud had shouted at the conductor “Oh do stop that terrible music”).
The first night was certainly a flop as far as the press was concerned – “disastrous” said the doyen of critics Desmond Shawe-taylor – and the production sank without trace. But I did go back to the Coliseum a couple of weeks later for Goodall’s expanded Meistersingers and that was life-changing – the orchestra’s warm glow and swelling grandeur, the quiet humanity of Norman Bailey’s Hans Sachs and glorious ease of Alberto Remedios’s Walther, remain vivid.
I went on to become a regular through my teenage years, as Sadler’s Wells Opera morphed into English National Opera and the Coliseum became affectionately known to us all as the dear old Coli. What great music-making emerged in those first seasons – Goodall’s Ring cycle alone would have justified the move from Rosebery Avenue (it could never have been accommodated there), but there was much else too: for instance, Prokofiev’s War and Peace, a gorgeous Traviata directed by John Copley, Janet Baker sublime in Mary Stuart and Julius Caesar, Charles Mackerras’s conducting, and four world-class sopranos – Josephine Barstow, Anne Evans, Rita Hunter, Valerie Masterson.
In the Eighties, a fiercer, hotter, more combative and theatrical sort of energy was generated, emanating from the leadership of Lord Harewood and the administrator Peter Jonas, conductor Mark Elder and director David Pountney, a trio of young lions determined to shake opera up and open its riches to a younger crowd. Some people will feel that the rot in production style started here: another indelible memory is the first night in 1984 of David Alden’s “chainsaw massacre” deconstruction of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, greeted with booing and cheering that must have been every bit as intense as that on the legendary premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps.
Yet it wasn’t all scandal and provocation: this was also the era of indisputably classic stagings such as Jonathan Miller’s Rigoletto and The Mikado, Nicholas Hytner’s Xerxes and The Magic Flute, Graham Vick’s Madam Butterfly, David Pountney’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – all of which remained freshly exciting and widely popular for 20 years or more.
There have been many marvellous stagings and performances since then too, but at this point I must stop the roll-call and emphatically state that the move to the Coliseum, intended as a mere pit stop, has been a tragic failure. Crisis after crisis has been met with multi-million-pound deficits, draconian cuts, strikes, bailouts, redundancies. The sums have never added up, and they never will: the model is faulty.
As Susie Gilbert’s excellent history Opera for Everyone elucidates, ENO’S current woes have their roots in the ill-judged move of 1968, exacerbated latterly by the inexorable decline in state funding and managements who have carried on spending by craftily kicking the ball down the line, sweeping problems under the carpet or waiting for the Arts Council to clean up the mess. The place simply doesn’t work efficiently or cost-effectively. That the stage is too wide for purpose and the auditorium too big for demand isn’t really the problem: the absence of office, rehearsal and storage space is.
Although the front of house was meticulously restored with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2003-04, backstage remains a shocking slum, still relying on fittings more than a century old. “If the air conditioning is Victorian, the plumbing is Plantagenet,” as one wag put it. To
‘In the Eighties, a fiercer, hotter, more combative and theatrical sort of energy was generated’
make matters worse, the company’s purchase of the freehold in 1992 came with strings attached that mean that a sale would be legally very complex – and in any case no obvious alternative base for the company presents itself.
The current swathe of problems include a worryingly inexperienced senior management team and an artistic director in Daniel Kramer who isn’t delivering what people want; a foolish adherence to a policy of presenting everything in English; a hideous revamp of the foyers that vitiates the “visitor experience”; rock-bottom morale among the chorus; and, undermining everything, a decline in productivity that has seen an annual average of 190 performances two decades ago reduced to 86 this season.
So dear ENO, while I wish you a happy 50th Coliseum birthday – and many thanks for the memories – I have to ask: isn’t it time you shut up shop and started over?