Lester Lynch in the ENO’s production of The Cunning Little Vixen
(Picture: Corbis via Getty Images)RIGHT now, London has two opera houses. (Berlin has three.) There’s the Royal Opera, the grand one, in Covent Garden, and, in the West End, you can see English National Opera a mile off, under the sparkly orb of the London Coliseum. They’re different. The Royal Opera attracts singers you’d double your overdraft to hear, with splendiferous productions, and charges accordingly. English National Opera is cheap as chips by comparison, with free tickets for under-21s and edgy productions.
But if the Arts Council’s plans go ahead, the English National Opera will lose its £12.5 million subsidy, thanks to a cultural levelling up agenda presided over by Sir Nicholas Serota, who should really know better. The ENO will be given £17 million to relocate elsewhere, possibly to Manchester. The company is optimistically proposing to keep its foothold at the Coliseum but as Sir Raymond Gubbay points out in a letter to The Times, the chances of it being able to do so are vanishingly slim. If it can’t afford to stay, we’ll be left with a single opera company in one of the great cultural capitals of the world. Here.
Sir Raymond also points out, quite correctly, that English National Opera has been mismanaged for years. Too true. It’s insane the number of productions it’s got wrong. It’s quite hard to turn off audiences with Verdi’s La Traviata, but the ENO managed it, with a dingy production and inaudible lead; the last Aida it staged had a miserable set and a rubbish Grand March. But its Gilbert and Sullivans are dandy.
And yet, it can’t be allowed to go out of London. It needs a less alienating approach to opera, but it does all the things successive governments have asked it to. It does outreach with local communities; it searches out new audiences; it gives free tickets to the young and has affordable seats for all.
This is madness. It could mean losing the orchestra, the part-time chorus, the technicians, many of whom learned their trade there. I’m all for levelling up, economically and educationally, but its extension to culture simply means less culture for all: levelling down. It’s plain philistinism to fund the Blackpool Illuminations and defund the ENO. People come to London for the arts from all over Britain, and from all over the world. Time for another U-turn.
