Sir John Tooley
General director of the Royal Opera House who battled funding cuts during the turbulent 1980s
SIR JOHN TOOLEY, who has died aged 95, was general director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, during some of its more turbulent years. He picked up the pieces of Rudolf Nureyev’s dramatic defection from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961; engineered the appointment of Georg Solti as musical director; and made the case for better public funding of the arts to an increasingly intransigent Margaret Thatcher and her ministers.
He also went some way to improving the accessibility of opera – fighting to retain affordable ticket prices, introducing the heavily branded Midland Bank Proms in 1972 (which lasted until the house’s closure for refurbishment in 1997) and taking “Big Top” seasons out of the capital.
By today’s outreach standards these initiatives may seem somewhat tame, but in their time they were innovative and forward-thinking, an acknowledgement that the Royal Opera had to reach beyond the gilded confines of Floral Street.
Through his office came every great conductor, singer and director of the second half of the 20th century, among them Solti, for whom Tooley acted as intermediary when the conductor’s first marriage fell apart (“Not an agreeable task,” Tooley noted); Jon Vickers, who declined to sing Captain Vere in Britten’s Billy Budd because of the character’s latent homosexuality; and Montserrat Caballé, who walked off stage during Un Ballo in Maschera when her love duet with Pavarotti went adrift and Bernard Haitink seemed unable to bring the two of them any closer, musically speaking.
When Tooley arrived at Covent Garden in 1955 Karl Rankl had not long resigned as music director after learning that Thomas Beecham and Clemens Krauss had been invited to conduct there without his knowledge. Rafael Kubelik’s appointment that year brought a period of musical joy as well as rigorous discipline, the Czech famously making his mark by sacking Tito Gobbi after the baritone failed to appear at the first rehearsal for Otello in 1955.
The Solti era, from 1961, coincided with the introduction of directors such as Peter Ustinov and Sam Wanamaker, although the Hungarian maestro was not universally welcomed, and Tooley had to persuade Solti not to resign when his car was covered in graffiti that read “Go home Solti”.
With Colin Davis, who arrived in 1971, Tooley was able to introduce Peter Hall as director of productions, as well as command a greater profile for contemporary works such as Tippett’s The Knot Garden. His final music director was Bernard Haitink, who joined in 1987, the year before Tooley’s departure.
Tooley was the ultimate establishment insider, groomed from an early age to perpetuate the succession at Covent Garden and to ensure that the Royal Opera remained a heavily subsidised club producing world-class performances. Nothing had prepared him for the chill wind of Thatcherism that blew through the corridors of the Garden in the 1980s, with subsidies squeezed, ticket prices raised to unprecedented rates and corporate cash pursued relentlessly.
More accustomed, perhaps, to resolving funding issues over lunch at the Ritz, Tooley found himself floundering in an oppressive political atmosphere. Furthermore, especially in his later years, there was little comfort to be had from the press, which in earlier days could have been relied upon to rally to the importance of a national opera house.
Hugh Canning, for example, wrote in The Guardian in 1987 that Covent Garden during the Tooley years had “become a byword for mediocrity in operatic theatre, at least in a European context”, while Rodney Milnes in The Spectator wrote of Tooley as “lurching from unplanned triumph to planned disaster”.
In his defence, Tooley was always working with what seemed like one – or even both – hands tied behind his back. He inherited a decrepit building ridden with Spanish practices and primitive equipment; he was juggling the competing demands of the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet rather than, like his European counterparts, being able to plan exclusively for only opera; and his subsidy, despite the costcutters in No 10 breathing down his neck, was always a fraction of that enjoyed by houses overseas.
Furthermore, big-name artists – and their agents – were beginning to awaken to their market potential, meaning that some performances would take place with several stars each earning five-figure fees.
He was a staunch believer in a Keynesian rather than a market-forces approach to arts funding, using every opportunity to trot out his firmly held view that “the arts should never be seen as a luxury, they are part of life.” Nevertheless, when the BBC was unable to find the funds to broadcast a remarkable Otello in 1980 starring Margaret Price and conducted by Kubelik, he did not hesitate in taking it instead to the commercial Capital Radio.
John Tooley was born in Rochester, Kent, on June 1 1924, and was educated at Repton, where he nursed an ambition to be a singer. He read Classics and History at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
After war service with the Rifle Brigade, where he gained administrative experience as an assistant adjutant, he joined the Ford motor company at Dagenham in 1948 as a graduate trainee. He was soon involved in his first dispute, taking his complaint to Sir Patrick Hennessy, the managing director, after discovering that the next intake of graduates were to be paid 4s 6d a week as opposed to his 3s 10d.
He was appointed secretary of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1952, working under Edric Cundell, the principal, and three years later joined the Royal Opera House as assistant to David Webster, the general administrator. During the 1960s he gradually assumed many of the ailing Webster’s responsibilities, formally taking over his predecessor’s post in 1970. His position was retitled general director 10 years later.
Such were the demands of the job – meetings in the morning, rehearsals in the afternoon, performances and receptions in the evening, often seven days a week – that Tooley found even living in Kensington too far, preferring to live “over the shop” in Covent Garden.
In retirement he was much soughtafter by musical organisations for his Establishment connections, serving on the boards of the Walton Trust, the Britten Estate and the Bath Mozartfest, among others. After Nureyev’s death in 1993 he maintained strong links with the dancer’s complex estate and even more complex family, finding an outlet for his energies in speaking about the dancer’s legacy and finding opportunities to display his costumes.
Tooley, who was knighted in 1979, published his memoir, In House, in 1999. Its appearance coincided with that of his successor, Jeremy Isaacs, for whom Tooley displayed his displeasure in what Petronella Wyatt once described as a “lofty tone”. However, while the critics acknowledged Tooley’s unrivalled experience at the heart of Covent Garden, the arriviste Isaacs’s account made for a more entertaining read.
Tooley was a tall, gentle, wellspoken man, with sandy hair, lightblue eyes and a slightly weather-worn face. Some said that he had the demeanour of a public school headmaster with a taste for the arts. He relished the informality of his era, recalling how a member of the percussion section would visit his office an hour before curtain up, clear his desk of papers, lie him down and massage his back; or how a wigmaster once followed him down the street shouting: “Come on John, it’s time to get your bloody hair cut.”
He inevitably had an enormous repertoire of tales to recall, such as the time a performance of Madame Butterfly started while Butterfly was still en route from the airport, or the occasion in Montreal when Britten and William Walton wanted to meet, but his presence was required: “There was no way that Britten would dine with Walton alone.”
However, he was sparing with his nostalgia, instead generously encouraging young musicians rather than boring them with tales of yesteryear. His nieces recall with glee how when the Royal Box at Covent Garden was not being used by its intended incumbents he would smuggle them in.
John Tooley was a man who enjoyed the company of many ladies, though he admitted that his family “paid a price for my attachment and commitment to the Royal Opera House”.
He was thrice married: to Judith Morris, in 1951 (dissolved 1965), with whom he had three daughters; Patricia Bagshawe in 1968 (dissolved 1990), with whom he had a son; and Jenniferanne Shannon in 1995 (dissolved 2003).
Sir John Tooley, born June 1 1924, died March 18 2020
Such were the demands of the job that he spent most of his time living ‘over the shop’ in Covent Garden