Operatic audiences are hardly unacquainted with productions whose symbolism is head-bangingly obvious, but the final performance of Alban Berg's Lulu at the English National Opera managed a symbolic value that, for once, was genuinely revealing. For, as has been widely reported, the audience's acclamation for Paul Daniel at the end of his last appearance as the company's music director was offset by a descant of equally enthusiastic booing from Ian McKay, ENO's director of marketing. It was not, of course, that McKay objected to Daniel's very lyrical approach to the opera, or that he thought it an artistic mistake to perform not only the two acts that Berg himself completed but also the third act, which was finished off from Berg's notes by Frederic Cehra. Rather, according to McKay's later public apology, it was because he felt that Daniel had "damaged the company's reputation" in an interview he had given to the Guardian the previous month. In that interview, Daniel had expressed doubts both about the ENO's chairman, Martin Smith, and its artistic director, Seán Doran: the first for his insistence that the company be regarded foremost as a business, and the second because of his operatic inexperience.
One can well imagine that the interview did not go down well within the ENO's administration, but it is one thing to question the policies or even the abilities of administrators and quite another to attack the institution that they administer. It is clear that Daniel has had to devote a great deal of energy to protecting the company's orchestra and chorus against those who would seek to make financial savings by "rationalising" them. The purpose of the interview seems to have been to alert those outside ENO to the continuing danger of such evisceration. If there were proposals to restructure the orchestra and chorus, Doran might keenly oppose them—but Daniel is surely prudent not to rely on this as their only defence. Whatever its effect on the reputation of the company, or rather its administration, the interview was intended to protect the interests of the ENO itself; an act of loyalty rather than disloyalty.
At the end of his tenure, and freed from the political in-fighting that must have proved such a distraction, Daniel conducted Lulu remarkably well. This is a difficult opera to bring off musically—the chances of it succeeding dramatically are, I fear, nil—but Daniel certainly did so. Lisa Saffer was a Lulu of tremendous vocal panache, while Robert Hayward showed that he is a much more natural Dr Schön than a Wotan. Daniel elicited the finest playing I have ever heard from the orchestra. If the whole thing suggested all too keenly what he might have achieved at ENO with less political distraction, it was sadly appropriate that discordant among the final sounds of the night were jeers from within the administration.
… and elitism and illiteracy
Of course, one should not underestimate the difficulty of running an opera house in these politically charged times, since there are so many interests that need to be attended to. The new plan at ENO is to introduce surtitles so that the audience can read the words being sung in case they cannot hear them. Since the point of performing opera in the vernacular is that the audience can react to it directly, taking in words and music at the same time, this frustrates the very purpose of ENO. If the audience is going to get the words independently of the music, it might as well pursue the very real advantages of singing in the original language: not only would that sound more convincing but the company would have a wider pool of singers to choose from. Interviewed on the Today programme, however, Doran made it clear that the idea is not for the audience to fix on the surtitles but to have them available should they miss the odd word. This, apparently, will be of particular importance to those seeing an opera for the first time: objections to the plan are—yes—elitist. This may be good news. If Doran really adheres to the principle that opera should be presented so that its details are intelligible to the neophyte, this should all but spell the end of the "concept" production. Surtitles would be a small price to pay to put an end to pole-dancing Rhine maidens and their like.
Even those who welcome what the ENO's website describes as the "latest initiative that underlines ENO's commitment to bring opera to the widest audience" may still note that Doran's statement was surprisingly politically incorrect, coming from the People's Opera. The widest audience? Only if you exclude those with what the National Literacy Trust calls "problems of literacy skills"—and that would seem a little, well, elitist. One would not have expected Doran of all people to have turned the ENO into yet one more area of social exclusion for the illiterate. In Lulu, despite its complexity, pretty well every word was audible not least because of Daniel's attention to orchestral balance and the care of the singers over their diction. If there are battles to come, Doran would do well to remember that part of the point of maintaining an orchestra, chorus, and ensemble of soloists who are familiar with the Coliseum's acoustic is that the whole audience is more likely to be able to follow what is going on without needing to look away from the stage.
