ENO’s big move is good for Manchester – but it may not be good for opera
Like a deus ex machina appearing from the heavens at the end of an opera’s fourth act, English National Opera have produced a last-minute formula which satisfies both the ambitions of the company for a continued existence, and the wish of Arts Council England to spread some more opera around the UK.
But today’s announcement that ENO will work with the “Manchester city-region” to establish a new home there by 2029 raises far more questions than it answers. Where will it perform? What will it perform? What resources will it need? This is clearly the beginning of the process rather than the end: it is inevitably going to be a long journey, and Arts Council England will have to support this move to the hilt if that organisation is to retain any credibility after its bungled approach to levelling-up.
The support of Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, and of Paul Dennett, City Mayor of Salford, is welcome and will be essential, but the vague enthusiasm for establishing partnerships with all the institutions of the city-region makes one wonder how ENO can establish a viable base from which to build crucial relationships with new audiences without a specific home of its own.
Manchester does have a track tradition of operatic activity – having grown up in the region, musically educated by the Hallé Orchestra, I am ancient enough to remember seeing Covent Garden touring with such leading stars as Tito Gobbi who sang the Count in Figaro during the 60s in the creaky old Opera House. It also presented packed-out weeks of Gilbert and Sullivan from the D’Oyly Carte Company – I even earned money as a teenaged walk-on in those seasons.
Subsequent attempts to make the city the second home of the Royal Opera did not succeed. The Manchester Opera House remains, an Ambassador Theatre Group venue for commercial shows, but attention shifted up the road to the Palace Theatre, also run by ATG, where Covent Garden promoted a couple of seasons in the 1980s, but that initiative was cancelled by the Arts Council on the relevant grounds that it was far too expensive.
Tony Hall at Covent Garden tried again in the 2000s, with enthusiasm from chancellor Gordon Brown and Manchester council leader Howard Bernstein, but they could not manage to establish a solid base of support before the financial crisis of 2008. Opera North in Leeds (ironically originally founded by ENO in 1977) is near enough to have tried establishing a Manchester base, and may well regard this new plan with scepticism, though it has loyally tweeted its support.
So what’s different now? New venues and new activities have been developed, notably the Lowry in Salford which has a proven record as a solid but not inspiring home for visiting opera, and now the just-opened Aviva Studios (largely thanks to George Osborne’s enthusiasm for the project), the vastly expensive performing arts centre in Manchester which is designed as a base for the Manchester International Festival (founded in 2007) and has yet to prove its suitability for more traditional shows.
Manchester is now hugely ambitious to compete with Birmingham as the country’s second city of choice with a cultural infrastructure, and will surely be squeezing the maximum compensatory investment from the cancellation of HS2 to make that happen. It is up to ENO to assess the options now, moulding its shows to fit the bold new spaces of Aviva Studios, or basing more traditional fare at the Lowry, finding the right spaces to fulfil its operatic ambitions.
But the present proposal is radically different from past initiatives in Manchester because now, no-one is talking about just transporting traditional opera out of London. The framing of today’s announcement in terms of partnership and innovation, public health and local talent, is of course designed to tick all the required boxes in ensuring investment. But there is a sticking-point here.
If ENO is to “focus on the development of new innovations in opera”, admirable in principle, what scope will there be for the tried and tested creative and technical work that must be the bedrock of a national opera company? We are in danger of going back to the Arts Council’s inexcusable naiveties about opera on social media and in pub car parks. These clichés have turned what could have been a fruitful two-way discussion about how to move the art-form forward into a slanging match which has done nothing to enhance the future of opera.
Meanwhile, where does this leave the home of ENO at the London Coliseum? The venue needs millions spending on its infrastructure so that it can house top-level commercial shows when ENO is up north. ENO will make sure to hang on to the venue in case (as some will go on hoping) the new plan does not work. It needs to argue vigorously for the critical mass of funding necessary to sustain both its work there and around Manchester, including an early commitment to a minimum sustainable London season for ENO at the Coliseum.
The whole question of what level of orchestra, chorus and technical staff are needed as a baseline is yet to be resolved, causing uncertainty and low morale in a critical period. The gods have not yet delivered.