Rupert Goold's Turandot: a bull in a Chinese restaurant
On successive nights at the London Coliseum at the end of October, the English National Opera showed its best artistic face to the world, quickly followed by its worst. The good ENO was a revival of David McVicar’s taut 2007 production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, conducted by Charles Mackerras, true to the piece and as well executed as you will ever hear and see. The bad was Rupert Goold’s bull-in-a-Chinese-restaurant mutilation of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, a deeply depressing show which seemed downright hostile to the work and to the efforts of Edward Gardner in the pit.
“I’m glad ENO exists, but I’m still not exactly sure what purpose it serves,” wrote Peter Conrad in a recent Observer review of Opera for Everybody: The story of English National Opera (Faber), Susie Gilbert’s new official history of London’s “other” opera company. It is a good question and one that any subsidised arts company should ask itself regularly. Watching ENO on these successive nights it was tempting to answer that, whatever it seeks to achieve, it actually provides what the two shows offered: a characteristically frustrating mix of the artistically scrupulous and unscrupulous that has made the Coliseum the most and least rewarding operatic theatre in the land.
Gilbert’s worthy but dull history is titled after the official ENO mission statement. “Opera for everybody” was how Lillian Baylis saw her pioneering Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, forerunner of today’s ENO. In the 1980s, half a century after Baylis’s death, ENO’s former managing director Peter Jonas would claim with pride that everyone at the Coliseum from management to doorman could tell you what ENO existed to do: share opera with the people, in the language of the people. But it is not true now, and it wasn’t entirely true in Jonas’s day.
Historically, there were three ways in which a people’s opera could differentiate itself from the opera house favoured by the rich. One was to offer the same operas more cheaply. The second was to offer different operas. The third was to challenge the way opera was performed, and maybe to challenge opera itself.
Over the years, ENO has evolved as a mixture of all three. It is still cheaper than its grander rival, the Royal Opera House. It offers some different repertoire too—four of the 14 pieces in ENO’s 2009-10 season have never been performed at the ROH. And ENO still performs overwhelmingly in English, while its productions are often non-traditional.
But the reality is more complex. ENO is not always cheaper than Covent Garden. My Coliseum stalls ticket to The Turn of the Screw cost me more than my balcony front-row ticket at Covent Garden for Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur last year. More of the ENO repertoire overlaps that of the Royal Opera and other companies than differs from it. ENO’s production style is neither unique to itself—shared productions are often the norm—nor consistent. Differences between ENO and Covent Garden exist, but they have become extremely blurred.
If it were true that ENO serves a different, less grand public than Covent Garden, then the Baylis principles would still be valid. But the distinction between the audiences is no longer as sharp as it was in the 1930s or even the 1980s. Audiences for opera, like audiences in general, are nowadays much more promiscuous in their taste. They go to see shows that attract them. They don’t “know their place” because they don’t have a place.
Equally, if ENO focused on a signature repertoire, then Conrad’s question might have an easier answer. Britten could be one of the pillars (along with, say, Handel, Gilbert and Sullivan, the better Broadway musicals and the American so-called minimalists like Adams and Glass) of an ENO core repertoire that was written in English. It would operate in relation to Covent Garden rather as the Tate galleries do to the National Gallery. Or ENO could restrict itself to singers from the British isles.
In Jonas’s time, the Coliseum became synonymous with shock. It was successful as far as it went—until the money ran out—but it undermined the Baylis ideal of an opera house for all. The house style attracted a younger audience, but one that could afford Covent Garden too. Moreover, Britten’s death in 1976 left a void where modern English opera had once been.
The result is the messy mix that you can still see at the Coliseum today. Sometimes ENO is wonderful. Other times it is dire. But it has no very clear artistic direction and even less artistic personality. It exists to exist, in Covent Garden’s shadow mostly. It is, of course, better that it should exist than not. But it lacks a larger purpose, and neither the present season nor Gilbert’s book can persuade me that it currently knows what that should be.
On successive nights at the London Coliseum at the end of October, the English National Opera showed its best artistic face to the world, quickly followed by its worst. The good ENO was a revival of David McVicar’s taut 2007 production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, conducted by Charles Mackerras, true to the piece and as well executed as you will ever hear and see. The bad was Rupert Goold’s bull-in-a-Chinese-restaurant mutilation of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, a deeply depressing show which seemed downright hostile to the work and to the efforts of Edward Gardner in the pit.
“I’m glad ENO exists, but I’m still not exactly sure what purpose it serves,” wrote Peter Conrad in a recent Observer review of Opera for Everybody: The story of English National Opera (Faber), Susie Gilbert’s new official history of London’s “other” opera company. It is a good question and one that any subsidised arts company should ask itself regularly. Watching ENO on these successive nights it was tempting to answer that, whatever it seeks to achieve, it actually provides what the two shows offered: a characteristically frustrating mix of the artistically scrupulous and unscrupulous that has made the Coliseum the most and least rewarding operatic theatre in the land.
Gilbert’s worthy but dull history is titled after the official ENO mission statement. “Opera for everybody” was how Lillian Baylis saw her pioneering Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, forerunner of today’s ENO. In the 1980s, half a century after Baylis’s death, ENO’s former managing director Peter Jonas would claim with pride that everyone at the Coliseum from management to doorman could tell you what ENO existed to do: share opera with the people, in the language of the people. But it is not true now, and it wasn’t entirely true in Jonas’s day.
Historically, there were three ways in which a people’s opera could differentiate itself from the opera house favoured by the rich. One was to offer the same operas more cheaply. The second was to offer different operas. The third was to challenge the way opera was performed, and maybe to challenge opera itself.
Over the years, ENO has evolved as a mixture of all three. It is still cheaper than its grander rival, the Royal Opera House. It offers some different repertoire too—four of the 14 pieces in ENO’s 2009-10 season have never been performed at the ROH. And ENO still performs overwhelmingly in English, while its productions are often non-traditional.
But the reality is more complex. ENO is not always cheaper than Covent Garden. My Coliseum stalls ticket to The Turn of the Screw cost me more than my balcony front-row ticket at Covent Garden for Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur last year. More of the ENO repertoire overlaps that of the Royal Opera and other companies than differs from it. ENO’s production style is neither unique to itself—shared productions are often the norm—nor consistent. Differences between ENO and Covent Garden exist, but they have become extremely blurred.
If it were true that ENO serves a different, less grand public than Covent Garden, then the Baylis principles would still be valid. But the distinction between the audiences is no longer as sharp as it was in the 1930s or even the 1980s. Audiences for opera, like audiences in general, are nowadays much more promiscuous in their taste. They go to see shows that attract them. They don’t “know their place” because they don’t have a place.
Equally, if ENO focused on a signature repertoire, then Conrad’s question might have an easier answer. Britten could be one of the pillars (along with, say, Handel, Gilbert and Sullivan, the better Broadway musicals and the American so-called minimalists like Adams and Glass) of an ENO core repertoire that was written in English. It would operate in relation to Covent Garden rather as the Tate galleries do to the National Gallery. Or ENO could restrict itself to singers from the British isles.
In Jonas’s time, the Coliseum became synonymous with shock. It was successful as far as it went—until the money ran out—but it undermined the Baylis ideal of an opera house for all. The house style attracted a younger audience, but one that could afford Covent Garden too. Moreover, Britten’s death in 1976 left a void where modern English opera had once been.
The result is the messy mix that you can still see at the Coliseum today. Sometimes ENO is wonderful. Other times it is dire. But it has no very clear artistic direction and even less artistic personality. It exists to exist, in Covent Garden’s shadow mostly. It is, of course, better that it should exist than not. But it lacks a larger purpose, and neither the present season nor Gilbert’s book can persuade me that it currently knows what that should be.
