‘I’ve been a bit obsessed with it for a long time,” says Annilese Miskimmon of the opera she’s rehearsing in the studio downstairs. Her words are appropriate: if there has ever been an opera about obsession, then Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City) is it. The opera, completed in 1920 and steeped in the communal sense of loss after the first world war, tells the story of a bereaved husband finally coming to terms with his wife’s death through a hallucinatory experience, after a chance encounter with her doppelganger. Or, as Miskimmon more punchily describes it, “a subconscious psychological thriller about a man who’s in a love triangle with a fantasy sex goddess and his dead wife”.
It’s quite a synopsis. Yet it’s the equally heady music that drew her to stage the work for her second production as artistic director of English National Opera – a welcome distraction, one imagines, from the current uncertainty over the company’s future, of which more later. Die Tote Stadt was an early hit for Korngold, completed when he was 23; the composer, who was Jewish, would later flee Vienna and find a home in the US, where his sumptuous film scores defined the sound of Hollywood movies for decades to come. The opera was banned by the Nazis yet has made its way back to the edge of the repertoire on mainland Europe and in the US. Still, it waited until 2009 for its first and so far only staging in the UK, at the Royal Opera. “I really wanted to hear our orchestra play it,” says Miskimmon. “It fills the Coliseum in such a way that we can really indulge the sound.”
The scene Miskimmon has been rehearsing has the husband, Paul, watching in horror as a group of partygoers – all in his mind, but very much visible to the audience – invade his house and desecrate mementoes of his wife, Marie: they stub cigarettes out on her photo frame, lark about with her favourite record. An elegant mid-century drinks trolley gets wheeled on drunkenly, shortly followed by Marie’s coffin; sketches taped on the studio walls include a group of nuns, who feature earlier in Paul’s marathon hallucination.
All a bit bonkers, yes – but the opera still speaks to today’s audiences, Miskimmon says. “It explores how grief meets religion meets the subconscious. I think very few people go through life without falling madly in love – when it’s not about that person, but about your own stuff; there’s something very modern and interesting about the idea that infatuation can be both very negative and an incredibly creative act. As I get older I have a greater appreciation of how life becomes about moving through various losses. This is a piece about a path through grief to a world that is lesser but still worth living in. Yet it’s not depressing – it’s full of beauty and colour and fun.”
In rehearsal, Miskimmon keeps the pace going but allows each cast member space to try things out, letting them know when they alight on something that works for her. “As a director I know what I want but I don’t want to know how to get there – because then you treat the performers in the room like robots instead of artists. I suppose I have the confidence that I don’t need to be a control freak, and that I and the people I work with will create something more surprising and beautiful when everyone feels they are a part of the process.”
That confidence was forged early in her career – before her stints in charge of Ireland’s Opera Theatre Company, Danish National Opera and Norwegian National Opera – when Miskimmon worked as assistant to some of the most respected directors in the opera world: Richard Jones, Deborah Warner, David Alden and the late Graham Vick. “Graham had this ability, which I believe in as well, especially as an artistic director – that you make work inspired by the actual place you are in and the audience there.”
That’s a hard thing for Miskimmon to do at the moment, though, given that nobody knows where ENO will be in a year’s time. In November, Arts Council England (ACE) announced it was axing ENO’s £12.6m annual grant unless the company moved wholesale out of London, throwing in the idea of Manchester as a possible destination, but without backing this up with any sort of plan or research. January brought a temporary reprieve, but a move out of London by 2026 is still demanded.
In late February ENO’s chief executive, Stuart Murphy, told the Stage that 10 areas were in contention, from Newcastle to Truro to East Croydon, but that ACE was also now recognising the Coliseum – its London HQ – as key to the company’s future. If the funding were right, he suggested, ENO could continue to do just as much work there while also putting on a season in its new home location. As Miskimmon knows, that’s a very big if indeed.
And yet the demand for opera in the Coliseum is demonstrably there, and the ACE announcement unleashed an outpouring of support for the company that she has found both humbling and empowering. Ticket sales are, she says, back at pre-Covid levels, with recent runs of Carmen, Akhnaten and The Rhinegold selling especially strongly. “There is this lie that we don’t sell out the Coliseum, and it’s really not true,” says Miskimmon. “The response from the audience and the atmosphere in the Coliseum has never been greater. In these conversations with the arts council the artistic value and health of the company has never been in doubt.”
Yet how much does ACE value that artistic health? November’s funding decisions represented a 30% decrease in money for UK opera as a whole – which, especially when taken together with last week’s announcement of job losses across the BBC orchestras and the complete closure of the BBC Singers, paints a bleak picture of a country with little care for the future of its classical music industry. ACE’s chief executive, Darren Henley, tried to defend its decision by writing that the future of the art form might lie in the “fresh thinking” of “opera in car parks, opera in pubs, opera on your tablet”, omitting to mention that England’s first drive-in car-park opera had been staged very successfully, mid-pandemic, by … ENO.
“There is no doubt that there is amazing alternative work going on elsewhere, which is growing audiences and is essential to the art form,” says Miskimmon, “but a lot of those people who make opera in digital form or in smaller spaces are also saying to me, ‘I want to work with ENO, I want to work at the bigger scale.’ At the moment, because our planning is on pause, I’m not able to give them opportunities, and that is really worrying.
“There is fear in the whole UK opera world when you look at that 30% loss of funding and the effect on talent, innovation, accessibility and the future of the art form. It’s bigger than ENO. The reason why you have internationally renowned UK talent is because they have come through an ecosystem that supports artists at every stage. Taking ENO out of that ecosystem is devastating. I fear we are losing a whole generation of talent who cannot be sustained in this country.”
How does Miskimmon herself define ENO? “I’ve thought this right from when I was a student and came here for £5 and saw my first ever Tristan and Isolde, with the Wagnerites around me in the gods feeding me sandwiches: that when you walk into the Coliseum for a show, there’s a feeling of excitement I’ve never felt with another opera company. I think it’s something to do with the fact that ENO wants to reveal things about operas in a way that honours these pieces but keeps the shock of the new. That thrill of discovery is so much part of ENO. I’ve worked for lots of wonderful organisations, and all of them have schemes and support to invite people who haven’t been to opera before, but the thing about ENO is that it’s in its DNA.”
• English National Opera’s The Dead City is at the London Coliseum from 25 March to 8 April
