To say that it has been a bumpy ride is an understatement – but oddly enough, English National Opera is back where it was in November 2022, when it was told that it would lose its entire government grant unless it moved outside London, probably to Manchester. That was the indirect result of then culture secretary Nadine Dorries’ insistence that millions of pounds of arts funding be transferred out of the capital as part of the Conservative government’s levelling-up agenda.
But it will be a very different company. While it will continue to stage some full-scale work in its London home, in Greater Manchester it will collaborate with venues and organisations across the city to make new kinds of operatic work at different scales. It has lost its stalwart music director, the conductor Martyn Brabbins, who resigned this autumn in the wake of proposals to abolish 19 posts at ENO’s orchestra and re-employ the other musicians part-time, and make cuts to the chorus, as part of what he called a “plan of managed decline”.
Is the new model for ENO “managed decline”? The proposed post-cutting and re-employment would be part of a move to a short, five-month season in London. It is undeniably the end for the company’s former year-round model of ensemble-led, large-scale work, a model that presented a cheaper, edgier, more accessible alternative for opera audiences in the capital to the purring Rolls-Royce that is the Royal Opera House. Livelihoods will be lost and an outstanding tradition broken. A five-month season simply isn’t the same as blood pumping through the veins of a brilliant full-time company.
The fact that ENO has circled back to Manchester is, in a way, surprising. A year ago, the great and the good of the city’s cultural scene were, to put it mildly, sceptical of having a reluctantly transplanted ENO visited upon them – “like cultural missionaries arriving to bring us great art from London” as one arts leader in the city put it to me. “If they want to come, come willingly. If you can’t come willingly, don’t come at all,” Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester said, somewhat testily.
What has abruptly changed, say insiders in Manchester, is the nature of conversations with ENO which, since Jenny Mollica took over as interim chief executive, have become more open and collaborative. One Manchester arts leader said, “My thinking pivoted from, ‘Go where you like, I’m not bothered,’ to ‘This could be really interesting.’”
On the ENO side, the decision of where to move to was based on conversations with a number of cities that boiled down to three possibilities: Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. Manchester was chosen because ENO felt it could fit into and work with the existing cultural ecology of the city. That is surely true. The infrastructure is incredibly confident: BBC Radio 3 will soon be established at the BBC base at Salford, and Manchester is the base for excellent organisations, from the arts centre Home and the new Aviva Studios to the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic orchestras, as well as the Manchester Camerata and the Manchester Collective. Some might even question whether a better destination for ENO might have been a city with less of a formal cultural offer already, but the idea is of collaboration and co-production, Manchester’s existing heft will be necessary.
Those with long memories will recall that, in 2008 - when Burnham was culture secretary - the Royal Opera House was on the point of establishing a “branch” in the city, in the Palace Theatre, notionally to be refurbished at the cost of some £80m. That was scuppered by the global financial crisis and fears that it would cannibalise the Opera North audience, which tours to Salford’s Lowry. Presumably such fears have been partly assuaged by the fact that in Greater Manchester, ENO will be making a different kind of work from main-stage operas behind a proscenium arch. Opera North is said to be open to finding ways to grow opera audiences together with ENO.
Is this a good outcome? It depends on the quality of work that the newly reshaped company eventually produces with its new Mancunian partners. One thing is clear – in the zero-sum game that the Conservatives have been playing with the arts in England, London is the loser and Manchester the winner. Whether you approve of that outcome depends on where you – literally – stand.
