The death of ENO has been long postponed

In my latest essay for The Critic, I argue that English National Opera died long ago for lack of a clear identity. It achieved great things against overwheling odds. But even if its state defunding is modified or reversed, the company cannot last much longer in its present form. It is an opera company that lost the plot. Just read the history:

One morning half a lifetime ago I was sitting in a garret office at the London Coliseum listening to the Queen’s cousin tell me what the public really wanted. The Earl of Harewood – George, when you got to know him better – was managing director of English National Opera from 1972 to 1985.

Neither he, nor anyone else, saw any kind of conflict between the ‘people’s opera’ being run by a king’s grandson, an Earl with a vast estate in Yorkshire. This was by no means the weirdest of a catalogue of anomalies and amateurisms that has now led to the defunding of London’s second opera house. Before long, ENO will be taught in college as a model in how not to make an opera…

…Did it have to die? The cause of death is a prolonged failure to address reality. Take opera in English, a founding act of faith. In the vast Coliseum the words were hard to hear, so surtitles were screened above the stage. We faced a Brobdingnagian drama of a Lithuanian tenor mangling Verdi in foreign tongue while a trendy translation flashed above our eyelines…

Read on here.

press photo: Tristram Kenton/ENO