Covent Garden rebranded: the 1940s

A little historical context is required in order to understand developments in the post-war period. Between the wars, opera was presented at Covent Garden primarily during the ‘Season’, when aristocratic families took up summer residence in London to present their daughters at Court. The theatre, otherwise used primarily for non-operatic entertainments, hosted the so-called ‘international season’, which was divided into German and Italian portions. Operas were sung either in the original or, eccentrically, translated into Italian, and principal singers were almost exclusively foreign ‘star names’, who shuttled between London and the major opera houses of continental Europe and the Americas. To many British observers, Covent Garden was an oddity, far removed from the ways in which opera was familiarly presented: in English, in hand-me-down costumes, and with no aura of ‘luxury’.

The post-war reopening of Covent Garden was seen as a symbolic event and offered an opportunity for institutional reinvention and rebranding. The theatre had never been regarded as a ‘national opera house’, but company minutes from the post-war period expressed overt ambitions to turn it into ‘a national centre of opera and ballet’.Footnote ¹⁰ The work chosen for the official relaunch was Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, performed by the Sadler’s Wells ballet company. For opera, a brand new company was to be formed, and the work chosen for its debut was Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, which the musicologist and critic Edward J. Dent called ‘an appropriate symbol of the new enterprise’.Footnote ¹¹

It is worth observing that the politics of founding the two companies were rather different. The ballet was transferring from Sadler’s Wells and thus moving from a people’s theatre to one with higher social prestige, placing at times uncomfortable demands upon the company to please a wealthier audience with different expectations, as Guthrie has incisively discussed.Footnote ¹² With opera, however, the new Covent Garden company was initially emulating the rival opera company that remained in situ at Sadler’s Wells. Furthermore, if the balletic relaunch of Covent Garden was a lavish occasion, many of the operatic performances that followed would be far removed from any sense of ‘grandeur’, as we shall see.

The cultural climate of the late 1940s was entirely different from that of the immediate pre-war era and the British opera industry had new audiences for whom to cater. There had been a huge expansion of interest, across class boundaries, in the so-called ‘high arts’ during the war, and much discussion in contemporary sources about how ‘cultured’ the nation was becoming. The post-war years would be a boom period for classical music in general, in terms of the establishment of new musical institutions and concert halls, and a more prominent place being given to music in schools, universities and extra-mural programmes.Footnote ¹³

The expanded wartime audience for classical music could be attributed in part to the efforts of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which toured the country putting on concerts in factories and at military camps, partly to boost morale, partly to raise tastes. CEMA was also involved with the wartime tours of Sadler’s Wells, temporarily operating out of Burnley, which were instrumental in taking opera to new audiences. At the end of the war, the director Tyrone Guthrie wrote that:

The success of CEMA led to a widespread openness to the idea of arts subsidy, hitherto regarded as a pipe dream. With regard to opera subsidy specifically, the Liverpool Daily Post stated:

The Arts Council of Great Britain was founded in 1946, loosely borrowing CEMA’s philosophy of giving ‘the best’ to ‘the most’, but changing the emphasis by moving more concertedly towards favouring professional over amateur artistic endeavours and prioritising large metropolitan companies.Footnote ¹⁶ Financial support for opera was a structural plank of the new Arts Council and John Maynard Keynes saw Covent Garden as central to his post-war cultural vision.Footnote ¹⁷ Later historians have criticised Keynes not only for allowing his personal artistic predilections to dictate funding priorities but also for focusing his attention on ‘elite’ forms of art, reneging on the principles of CEMA.Footnote ¹⁸ Such readings, while assessing Keynes’s preferences fairly, often fall into the trap of equating opera per se with ‘elitism’, making sweeping assumptions about it always having been a luxurious, expensive activity associated with privilege, a stereotype I have challenged vehemently elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁹

Furthermore, while some historians have taken a rather disapproving stance on the Arts Council’s ambitious focus during this period – themselves reinforcing a long-standing British antipathy towards opera when performed in contexts perceived to be ‘luxurious’ or ‘foreign’ – there is a case for characterising it more positively.Footnote ²⁰ The Arts Council’s early privileging of ‘excellence’ can be read as a betrayal of artistic endeavour that was small-scale, participatory and so on, but it could also be interpreted as having enabled the creation and strengthening of major British arts institutions, to the considerable benefit of British audiences for decades thereafter and also to generations of British performers. Nor did the Arts Council ignore composers. As Lew writes, ‘The two sides of the national operatic scene in post war Britain – establishing high professional standards for native performers and creating a native repertory – were closely related, although they sometimes came into conflict with one another.’Footnote ²¹

The question of ‘how to make opera pay’ had long been a vexed one: an earlier attempt to subsidise it in the early 1930s had proved abortive.Footnote ²² If opera were to be funded for the post-war age, and public support for that funding maintained, Covent Garden would have to shed its aura of luxury and reinvent itself as a national opera company. It was clear, in any case, that the theatre could not reopen on the same lines as before the War. Whereas relaunching aristocratic, international opera at Covent Garden was possible after the First World War, it was no longer feasible after the Second World War. The aristocrats who had been the lynchpin of the interwar audience had seen their financial and social power weakened. In the austere post-war years, Covent Garden had to be decisively and symbolically detached from what remained of the Season, even if Dent wrote privately in 1949 that he suspected the Covent Garden management of ‘hankering after the old glamour of the International seasons’.Footnote ²³

Thanks to subsidy from the Arts Council – 4s. a head for the 2,350,000 people who visited between February 1946 and March 1950 – Covent Garden had the funds to reinvent itself.Footnote ²⁴ Opera would henceforth be staged for eleven months of the year rather than three, and tickets would be cheaper and more easily available, due to the abandonment of the pre-war subscription system that required patrons to book prolonged runs. Discussions about what language opera should be presented in and where singers should be recruited from and trained were revisited afresh, as Covent Garden cast its cosmopolitanism aside.

A patriotic agenda guided the rebranding of Covent Garden. The company announced that operas were henceforth to be sung in the vernacular, as was standard practice on the Continent, with exceptions to be made for a handful of works.Footnote ²⁵ There were also concerted efforts to perform more British operas. Britten’s Peter Grimes, much celebrated at its Sadler’s Wells première for epitomising a new flowering of cultural endeavour after the war, swiftly transferred to Covent Garden. The Earl of Harewood (later Director of the Royal Opera House), described it as having ‘an important part to play in the whole scheme to establish an English Opera at Covent Garden’.Footnote ²⁶ But in general, the repertoire would remain broad and international: over the first nine years eighteen German operas were staged, eleven Italian, four French, nine English, three Russian, and one Czech.Footnote ²⁷

A new company had to be founded, to be known as the Covent Garden Opera Company, a title that would be retained until 1968, when it was renamed the Royal Opera. The hiring of an Austrian-born conductor, Karl Rankl, who had arrived in Britain as a refugee in 1939, raised hackles, many commentators, including The Times leader writer of 17 June 1946, having expected the role to have gone to an established British operatic conductor such as Thomas Beecham.Footnote ²⁸ (The latter’s typically irascible response, coloured by vested interest, was that the hiring of a foreigner was ‘a sign of degeneration’, which would make Britain the laughing stock of the world.Footnote ²⁹) But British artists were to design costumes and sets and, in an astonishing reversal of the prewar policy of hiring foreign stars almost exclusively, the company would now employ British soloists. This was not merely a pragmatic response to post-war travel restrictions on international performers or concern at the ‘tainting’ of German singers, though these were hurdles. Rather, it was a matter of ideological policy, the company declaring that ‘The Soloists will be chosen almost entirely from among singers already known in this country and from unknown singers discovered in the auditions which are … being heard in London and the provinces.’Footnote ³⁰

The sorts of people aspiring to become opera singers in mid-twentieth-century Britain were certainly not confined to the upper echelons of society; in fact, the majority were the children of shopkeepers, low-grade office workers and clerks, with a significant minority coming from the manual working class.Footnote ³¹ Covent Garden’s democratic initiative gave a previously unimaginable opportunity to singers from diverse backgrounds. As countless press clippings in the Royal Opera House archives testify, numerous ‘ordinary’ people auditioned at Covent Garden, and their success was widely celebrated in national and regional publications. To cite just one example of many, three Rhondda miners were chosen at audition in Cardiff and the question of whether two of them, Ieuan Evans and Wilfred Jones, would be released from their jobs down the pit was reported nationally, the story running and running until an intervention from their MP resolved matters.Footnote ³²

There was great initial goodwill surrounding the new company and its performances attracted an audience drawn from an expanded social base. The Tribune declared in 1947 that the rise of a new public for opera, and the fact that the old operatic social snobbery of the Edwardian era had ‘gone for ever’, demonstrated that the country was close to having what it had never had before: ‘genuine native opera’.Footnote ³³ Other commentators observed that opera was no longer ‘grand and remote … an annual fixture to be read about with detached interest … an expensive bloom, a hothouse orchid’.Footnote ³⁴

However, the adoption of a Sadler’s Wells-type model at Covent Garden would soon be challenged, as, within a year, figures close to the opera world began to observe that musical standards were insufficiently high. (Lew is overly optimistic in writing that ‘After 1945, English musical culture – its composers, performers, and institutions – could be declared mature and equal to any other country.’Footnote ³⁵) In 1947 Harewood noted that ‘the shortage of outstanding voices is uncomfortably evident’, while the critic Ernest Newman observed that many company members approached operas with a peculiarly English vocal timbre and speech-inflections, which made it difficult for them to ‘get quite inside the skin’ of foreign works.Footnote ³⁶

The new recruits had decent voices but not necessarily formal musical literacy; most had only sung oratorio and had no stage experience.Footnote ³⁷ The first season included, according to Harold Rosenthal, a Carmen with an ‘uneven’ eponymous protagonist and a ‘vocally rough’ Micaëla, a Magic Flute with a ‘poorly sung’ Papageno who assumed an Irish accent for ill-advised comic effect, a ‘vocally erratic’ Queen of the Night and an ‘un-Mozartean’ Pamina, and a Turandot whose Ping, Pang and Pong trio was ‘a sorry affair’.Footnote ³⁸ His summary of the years to 1950 was that ‘the standard of singing and orchestral playing varied from the outstanding to the deplorable’.Footnote ³⁹ Audiences made their feelings known: attendance was consistently at or below a third of capacity for the expensive areas of the House throughout late 1947.Footnote ⁴⁰

This led to a swift about-turn on the policy of all-British casting, Rankl grasping that some European singers would need to be used to swell the ranks.Footnote ⁴¹ A few ordinary British singers did manage to sustain decades-long careers with the company, such as the tenor Edgar Evans, who had funded his training by working as a milkman, and the bass Michael Langdon (né Frank Birtles), a building society clerk from Wolverhampton who had sung in pantomime.Footnote ⁴² But admission to the company would soon become more difficult, as is illustrated by the example of Ian Wallace, later a popular radio and television personality, well known from the panel game ‘My Music’. Wallace, then a young aspiring actor, had had no more than a handful of singing lessons while a Cambridge undergraduate. Though offered the role of Papageno at Covent Garden, he felt ‘out of [his] depth’ and took up a place with the New London Opera Company at the Cambridge Theatre instead. In 1948, Wallace reauditioned for Covent Garden but was turned down: the window for moderately talented British amateurs to join the company had closed.Footnote ⁴³

By this time, foreign guest principals, including Paolo Silveri, Kirsten Flagstad and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, were being hired, now compelled to sing in the vernacular.Footnote ⁴⁴ Harold Rosenthal later noted that ‘foreign guest artists were singing in unrecognizable English before the end of the company’s second season’.Footnote ⁴⁵ On occasion, there was a return to the strange practice of polyglot performance that had been common during the interwar period: reports in 1948, for example, of an English-language performance of Aida in which a tenor ‘pursued his solitary way in Italian’.Footnote ⁴⁶

But as time went on, and more stars refused to relearn roles, the management began to introduce more original-language performances, not only as a concession to singers but in recognition of the fact that some audience members were actively avoiding those in English. The popularity of the New London Opera Company, which performed Italian operas in Italian to ordinary West-End theatregoers, demonstrated that opera in other languages was something ‘ordinary’ British listeners were now beginning to tolerate. The language policy at Covent Garden became rather ad hoc: in January 1948, for instance, the company presented The Mastersingers in English one month and Tristan und Isolde in German the next.Footnote ⁴⁷

The return to hiring foreign stars led to protests from newly empowered British singers. In October 1948 some 200 singers from Covent Garden, Sadler’s Wells and the Carl Rosa Company attended a meeting at Victory House, Leicester Square, organised by the British Actors’ Equity Association, to object to the ‘infiltration’ of foreigners into British companies.Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, when the Vienna Opera visited in 1947, the Musicians’ Union opposed the use of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and picketed Covent Garden.Footnote ⁴⁹ This can be related to a broader backlash against foreign personnel in the post-war West End. An influx of American musicals that began in the 1920s and intensified during the war was seen as a means of building cultural connections with a vital ally. By 1946, however, the dominance of American performers and entertainers in London was such that British songwriters and playwrights began to express concern at the threat to their own interests, and the promotion of American plays and musicals on the BBC led to formal objections from the press and the Songwriters Guild.Footnote ⁵⁰

Thus, although it had been perceived by Covent Garden and the Arts Council that ‘national’ opera, along the lines of Sadler’s Wells, was what was needed and wanted, the reality in this particular context was considerably more complicated. The experiment with a national model of opera at Covent Garden was shaped by the broad democratisation of the arts during the war by bodies such as CEMA and by the post-war desire for national cultural rejuvenation. It was reflective of a new sense of national confidence and a vision of a united, classless society that prevailed in Britain after the war. This noble ideal was thwarted by a combination of commercial and creative factors: the relative lack of appetite for national opera at this particular institution, and a concern on the part of critics and management that Covent Garden would fail to compete with other great operatic institutions internationally if a strict policy of hiring British singers resulted in insufficiently high artistic standards. And yet, the U-turn was only partial: the company would continue to be guided by certain ‘national’ impulses as it carved out a niche over the next two decades as a new type of international company.

A new type of internationalism: the 1950s

Faced with new pressures during the 1950s, the Covent Garden management was forced constantly to reflect upon the national vs international status of the company. Aspects of the post-war policy were no longer working, yet the company was aware that retaining its Arts Council funding depended upon maintaining a semblance of being a national institution and that any perceived drift back into internationalism along prewar lines would generate heavy criticism from the press.

By the 1950s, British opera was flourishing as never before. This was a decade that saw Covent Garden host the first performances of Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Britten’s Billy Budd and Gloriana, Walton’s Troilus and Cressida and Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage. Thus, the company was at the forefront of showcasing new British operas, but the question of their regular position in the company’s repertoire, or whether there should be concerted efforts to revive older British operas, was complicated. David Webster (Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House, 1945–70) was keenly attentive to matters of repertoire, often raising the question of whether more new English operas should be staged. However, he was well aware that this would lead to losses that would have to be offset by staging foreign ‘lollipops’.Footnote ⁵¹

In terms of casting, the company was keen to continue supporting British singers and building up a permanent resident company along the lines that could be found in most major European opera houses. ‘British’, of course, did not mean quite the same thing it means today: the company was in the fortunate position of being able to cast its net wider than the British Isles while remaining entirely faithful to its nationalist casting pledge. Listings from the later 1950s of artists on full contract included singers from Australia (notably Marie Collier and Joan Sutherland), South Africa and Canada, all British citizens at the time.Footnote ⁵² It also included an occasional singer from Ireland or America, and two from continental Europe (the Czech bass Otakar Kraus, a former soloist with the Carl Rosa, and the Dutch tenor Hans Kaart).Footnote ⁵³

Company minutes asserted that ‘the greatest possible opportunities should be given for the development of British artists, in certain circumstances even at some financial risk, always provided that this entails no lowering of artistic standards’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, the company was prepared to admit that this ideal was not always easily attainable, stating in an operational review of 1956 that ‘It is no small part of our achievement that we can muster so much native talent in opera and ballet, but there are times and occasions when we must look elsewhere for help’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Music director Rafael Kubelik wrote to the philosopher and Oxford don Isaiah Berlin (a member of the Covent Garden board) in July 1956 that ‘Guest stars here are of course not only unavoidable but also welcome. This does not interfere in any way with my most important activity – to help enlarge the basic ensemble of English singing with British singers.’Footnote ⁵⁶

There were sometimes gaps in particular voice parts: in May 1956, for example, it was minuted that the company lacked a first-class mezzo-soprano and Italianate baritone, and that the front line of tenors and basses was not as strong as it might be.Footnote ⁵⁷ There were certainly still internal concerns about vocal standards. In an ironic aside to Berlin, the record producer and critic Walter Legge, long associated with Covent Garden, wrote in December 1958 that the Opera Sub-Committee should not meet over lunch because ‘That is no way seriously to discuss serious matters. It is as amateurish as the general level of the Garden’s operatic performances.’Footnote ⁵⁸ And Berlin concurred that if a forthcoming production of Lucia di Lammermoor was as poor as anticipated, ‘it will be the best evidence possible that the proposition of first-class opera with local talent is a utopian term at present’, identifying as a stumbling block Lord Harewood, ‘who is the chief protector of local talent’.Footnote ⁵⁹

The company also had to consider the box office: the fact that audiences continued to defy expectation by demonstrating a distinct preference for foreign works presented in the original language.Footnote ⁶⁰ Opinions differed as to whether this was the result of rising levels of discernment or sheer snobbery. Audiences of the 1950s were increasingly being exposed, via the Third Programme and LPs, both to operas in other languages and to the best international singers, whom they were keen to see in the flesh. Opportunities to hear visiting foreign troupes at Covent Garden from Vienna, Milan and Munich in the late 1940s and early 1950s had proved popular.Footnote ⁶¹ As the Royal Opera House’s annual report for 1958–9 reported, London was now a candidate for the title of ‘musical capital of the world’, a city which ‘is used to the best and … determined to get it’.Footnote ⁶² But Tyrone Guthrie, long associated with the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells, put a more negative spin on things, arguing that the type of opera London preferred was the same sort New York preferred: opulent and ‘sold at a price which prohibits wide popularity and gives the performance great snob appeal’.Footnote ⁶³

In the later 1950s, the question of the language policy, by now something of an elephant in the room, was revisited on several occasions, not least when the press decided periodically to protest at the perceived abandonment of the English-language policy. The company came under criticism from both the Star and The Times in October 1959 on this matter, prompting a flurry of panicked internal correspondence, including a frustrated tirade in private correspondence from Isaiah Berlin about ‘failed English singers and embittered unperformed bad composers’ and pressure to do ‘endless performances of Hugh the Drover etc.’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Although Rafael Kubelik reaffirmed the post-war English-language policy upon his appointment as musical director in 1955 – once again Beecham attempted to whip up a furore about the selection of a foreign conductor – the company’s Opera Sub-Committee reconvened the following year to revisit the issue of the language policy.Footnote ⁶⁵ It decided against a radical abandonment of the post-war policy but supported the occasional introduction of operas in the original language, particularly in Italian.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1958, the management went a step further when drawing up a new policy for opera, the primary objective of which was, pragmatically, ‘to fill the house’. It acknowledged the preference of Covent Garden patrons and the fact that the audiences for London’s two permanent opera houses – Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells – were quite distinct.Footnote ⁶⁷ The policy of opera in English should still not be abandoned, but operas should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.Footnote ⁶⁸ Most strikingly, committee minutes stated that: ‘In other words, where there is a conflict between quality of performance and performance in English, the latter may be sacrificed.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Mindful, perhaps, of the protests from singers at the end of the 1940s, the management tried to present the drift towards foreign-language performances as a boon for both audiences and company members. Original-language productions made it easier to replace indisposed cast members with foreigners brought in at short notice. However, it also had the benefit, the company argued, of providing useful experience for British singers hoping to establish international careers, who would otherwise be forced to relearn roles when performing them abroad.

All these practicalities made good sense on artistic and commercial grounds, but posed a conundrum: did ‘international’ opera deserve to be subsidised? It certainly needed to be. This was no longer the interwar model of international opera – a society event that had been a self-funding entity – but rather a model that was international in a purely artistic sense and as dependent on state funding as the national opera of the immediate post-war years. Nevertheless, the drift back towards a more international model, and the headlines that inevitably generated, meant that the question of subsidy was once again under scrutiny from the press.Footnote ⁷⁰

In 1950, Covent Garden was granted £145,000 by the Arts Council, in comparison with £90,000 for all spoken drama.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1952, Covent Garden’s subsidy rose to £150,000 and had reached £270,000 by 1956.Footnote ⁷² By 1958, two thirds of the entire Treasury grant to the arts was going on opera, and over 80 per cent of that sum was being spent on opera in London.Footnote ⁷³ Both Labour and the Conservatives were fully committed to generous state subsidy for the arts at this point, each publishing policy documents in 1959 (respectively entitled ‘Leisure for Living’ and ‘The Challenge of Leisure’) that called for it to be increased, while a further Conservative pamphlet, ‘Patronage and the Arts’ (1959), argued for Covent Garden’s funding to be raised to £500,000 p.a.Footnote ⁷⁴ Some left-wing politicians, however, were resentful of subsidy for this institution, with Julian Snow, the Labour MP for Lichfield and Tamworth, objecting in Parliament to Arts Council funding being spent ‘Mostly on German artists at Covent Garden’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Some dissenting voices expressed concern at rising subsidy for Covent Garden when companies presenting opera on national lines were in financial crisis. The position of Sadler’s Wells in the late 1950s was precarious: in spite of good box-office takings, the reserve it had had on its return to London from the provinces in 1945 had been exhausted and costs of materials and wages had increased.Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1958 the company was forced into an unwelcome merger with the Carl Rosa; the latter had long presented opera on a shoestring and was now heavily in the red.Footnote ⁷⁷

Whereas the foundation of the Arts Council had been widely supported amid the celebratory atmosphere of the immediate post-war years, a decade on it was starting to face difficult questions about its identity and purpose, and questions of nationalism vs internationalism were part of the conversation. Speaking in 1958 about the Arts Council remit, the editor of the Observer asked, ‘Should the emphasis be on pure amenity (give the people what they want), or on education (give them what’s good for them), or on national prestige (think what foreigners will say)?’Footnote ⁷⁸ Even for many in the arts world, Covent Garden’s large subsidy did not feel fair because the theatre appeared to be leaning too far, once again, towards the last of these three emphases, while other companies that seemed arguably to serve the population better were suffering. The notion of an international opera house in receipt of state subsidy was, in Thomas Beecham’s eyes, an absurdity, since ‘three-quarters of the taxpayers of this country never see such performances as those lately of The Ring: they are exclusively a metropolitan luxury’.Footnote ⁷⁹ It is interesting to note this lack of consensus among arts professionals about the merits of state subsidy for opera, though Beecham’s comments need to be placed within the context of his general, almost pathological resentment towards Covent Garden at this time.Footnote ⁸⁰

Covent Garden, however, pressed the case for continued, and indeed increased, funding. The truth of the matter was that the company was now dependent on it, for the costs of the operation could not be covered from takings alone.Footnote ⁸¹ In 1952, a fully sold-out performance would still cost £500 more than could be raised at the box office.Footnote ⁸² Costs extended far beyond sets and costumes. Major museums and galleries had their maintenance costs paid by the Ministry of Works as the custodian of the cultural property of the nation, but the Covent Garden Opera Company was merely the lessee of the Ministry of Works on a commercial basis and had to pay for the use of the theatre and any structural defects.Footnote ⁸³ Money therefore had to be spent on maintenance of an ageing building, rent, rates and insurance, external storage of sets and costumes, and the hire of rehearsal studios, as well as on union-agreed wages for company employees, and on soloist fees dictated by the global market.

During the 1955–6 season, the opera company received income of £382,000, yet spent £730,000, leaving a deficit of £348,000. Its £250,000 subsidy covered much of this, but a further £98,000 remained to be found.Footnote ⁸⁴ Year after year, to the end of the 1950s and for several decades beyond, Covent Garden’s annual reports began by repeatedly declaring that financial survival was the company’s greatest concern. A statement from 1956 by the Chairman of the Royal Opera House noted that subsidy had almost always been essential when establishing a State Opera, and that at this stage in the Royal Opera’s House’s ‘experiment’ it was justifiable, in order to build up the organisation, and to ‘foster in a democratic community tastes which hitherto have been sustained on a more restricted basis’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Far higher sums were being granted to foreign opera houses by the late 1950s: £1,000,000 p.a. to the Paris Opéra, and £575,000 to La Scala, Milan, for a far shorter season.Footnote ⁸⁶ Clearly, the intention was that Covent Garden should consider itself to be on a footing with such companies, and the statement made it clear that the current rate of subsidy was now insufficient, not for reasons of lavishness or waste, but because of inflation and fixed costs beyond the organisation’s control.Footnote ⁸⁷

Shortening the season would not resolve the problem and neither would cutting down on new productions (leading, as both would, to a loss of receipts).Footnote ⁸⁸ The only solution, the company argued, was to increase the subsidy further. It was impossible to raise funds by increasing audience size, since attendance was already at or near full capacity, and there was little scope to increase ticket prices, since the subsidised company felt obliged to keep in line with other West End theatres.Footnote ⁸⁹ The company was also attentive, even at this stage, to the question of ‘access’, stating in 1956 that it endeavoured to ‘attract as many as possible to the House, in all ranges of income, catering for the needs of the purse of the student’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Thus, the company found itself, a decade after its foundation, at an impasse. Any reversion to the old international system would run completely counter to the principles on which the post-war company had been formed; it would also be economically unviable.Footnote ⁹¹ The national model, however, had proved both commercially unpopular and artistically wanting. The new blended model was the only way forward, but it had to be presented in ways that justified ongoing subsidy.

Let us return to the Observer’s three competing criteria for justifying arts funding: pure amenity, education and national prestige. Covent Garden claimed to be ticking the ‘amenity’ box (giving people what they wanted) and ‘education’ box (giving them what was good for them), by arguing that post-war opera had shifted from being a ‘private art for the delectation of eminent persons’ to ‘a popular art of wide appeal’. It cited in support of this the fact that over 1.5 million people a year now attended performances of opera and ballet.Footnote ⁹² On the home front, the company also asserted that it was contributing to the national good in the form of providing employment. Opera was becoming an art form in which more British people were participating, and if singers were to leave the security of the concert platform for the stage, they must be reassured there would be stages available on which to earn a living. State subsidy allowed the company to provide the vital training and employment that would foster a national school of British opera.

But the Observer’s third criterion of national prestige (thinking what foreigners would say) was also important, and this needed careful handling because of historic negative bias against opera as a ‘foreign’ art form. First, Covent Garden was keen to show to the world that it was now producing British artists who could hold their own on the international stage, boasting that it had fostered a new global star from within the ranks in Joan Sutherland.Footnote ⁹³ But there was also something more intangible at stake: the nation’s place close to the top of the international pecking order of civilised nations. Covent Garden wanted to show that its artistic standards were every bit as high as those that were to be found at opera companies in Europe or the United States and there were regular internal conversations about whether this ambition was being fulfilled. A memo from the late 1950s noted that ‘In recent conversations, both Mr Kubelik and Mr Kempe put London firmly amongst the Metropolitan centres … Milan, Vienna, New York, Paris and London.’Footnote ⁹⁴

In addition, opera could also be used as a form of ‘soft power’ overseas, something that is illustrated by the Covent Garden company’s visit to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for the Rhodes centenary celebrations of 1953. The Rhodes Centenary Exhibition that was the focal point of the year was designed to confirm locals’ status as British subjects and rally the population around a shared identity based heavily upon foundation myths, devotion to Cecil Rhodes and loyalty to the Royal Family. Such efforts were deemed necessary in response to growing anti-imperial sentiment in neighbouring Afrikaner nationalist South Africa and other indications of local discontent.Footnote ⁹⁵

The exhibition was a showcase for both African and European culture. A recreation of a traditional African village exhibit was designed to give the white population a deeper insight into local customs and, conversely, examples of European culture were presented in order to counter negative representations of white behaviour that locals had seen in cowboy films. A nearly year-long programme of cultural events by visiting British arts organisations included concerts by the Hallé Orchestra, Shakespeare plays featuring John Gielgud, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, and performances by the Covent Garden Opera Company of Aida, La bohème, The Marriage of Figaro and Gloriana – Britten’s none-too-successful recent Coronation commission. Leaving aside the obvious temptation to criticise the venture some seventy years later as an instance of cultural imperialism, it is interesting for our purposes for the very fact that opera was considered worthy of inclusion among the ‘the best and most recognisable’ examples of ‘British culture’, given historic national antipathy towards the art form.Footnote ⁹⁶

The goodwill required to justify public subsidy for Covent Garden depended upon the public accepting opera at the highest level as a fundamental part of the nation’s identity, and emblematic of it in the eyes of foreigners, but by the late 1950s this was a fragile consensus. Covent Garden’s report for the year 1957–8 struck a rather desperate note, stating:

Striving for excellence: the 1960s

By 1960 it was now even more obvious that the post-war formula at Covent Garden was foundering. The rough-and-ready opera-in-English approach that still characterised some performances by the home company was alienating the theatre’s core audience, which was, according to the Observer, ‘by no means disposed to tolerate provincial standards’ and which ‘more often than not reeled from the theatre in a state of mingled rage and despair, swearing never to return’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The post-war policy had also, many felt, reduced Covent Garden’s distinctiveness. It had tried to be ‘a large-scale Sadler’s Wells’, in its language policy, ticket pricing and manner of presentation, and it would emulate Sadler’s Wells further in sporadically sending troupes on tour, spending a week apiece in Oxford, Coventry, Leeds and Manchester in 1961, and making its first appearance at the Edinburgh Festival that summer.Footnote ⁹⁹ But since there was no chance of taking any international stars to the provinces, and with a typical loss of £9,000–£10,000 on each week of a tour, this was hardly a compelling answer to the company’s financial problems. Ultimately, furthermore, the audience that wanted ‘cheap, relatively modest performances in the vernacular’ remained loyal to Sadler’s Wells itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Covent Garden laid out an official statement of aims for the new decade in its 1960–1 Annual Report (and reasserted its commitment to these aims in later ones). The company would develop a new, broad repertoire, something it regarded as a duty to audiences and imperative in fostering British operatic performance. This would involve performing established canonical works, reviving interesting operas from outside the standard repertoire and staging new works, particularly by British composers. The latter was a commitment it would stick to, even though British operas often attracted small audiences. For example, when revivals of Peter Grimes and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 1961–2 season failed to sell well, the company stated: ‘This, it goes without saying, must not and will not deter us from keeping in our repertory the works of our own most distinguished composers. It is naturally our hope that the quality of such works will be increasingly recognized by London audiences.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus, it was envisaged that in due course the programming of more challenging British works would lead to an improvement in British tastes.

The highest international standards of performance needed, the company decided, to be pursued, so that Covent Garden could compete with renowned companies worldwide. The company kept a close eye on the state of play among its international competitors. Berlin wrote in January 1960 of being impressed by a visit to the Metropolitan Opera, which was endowed with more money, more space and a ‘general sense of luxe in the choice of artists’; by comparison, a recent performance of La traviata at Covent Garden had been ‘a real fiasco’ and one of Turandot was said to have looked ‘very ragged and shoddy – like a provincial pantomime’.Footnote ¹⁰²

To emulate foreign competitors, Covent Garden reasserted its commitment to the discovery and development of the best British singers at the start of the 1960s, but also stated without apology that it would not hesitate to employ talented foreigners.Footnote ¹⁰³ A reciprocal process of artistic exchange began. The company expressed its pride in both welcoming foreign stars to Covent Garden and in sending its own singers out to the other great theatres of the world: a list of company members’ guest appearances overseas became a regular page in the Annual Reports. British singers were also supported via the Astor Fund to spend periods undertaking masterclasses with teachers abroad.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Thus, after a long period of reflection and experiment, weighing up the merits of the two models, the company had settled decisively upon a compromise that would allow it to pursue the highest standards in performance, something that became a mantra of Georg Solti, who arrived at Covent Garden in 1961 determined to make it the best opera house in the world.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Solti nevertheless remained keen to foster British talent, stating in discussions about his appointment that he was anxious that Covent Garden should employ the best native conductors, that promising British singers be given two- rather than one-year contracts, and agreeing that sometimes exchanging artists with Sadler’s Wells was important.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The early 1960s was a period when long dreamed-of major British cultural institutions were being formally established and receiving considerable press attention. The Royal Shakespeare Company was founded as a permanent company in 1961 and the National Theatre in 1963, initially at the Old Vic. Against this backdrop, the Royal Opera House’s not-quite British status stuck out. From time to time, therefore, the company felt compelled by press criticism to defend its use of foreign stars. In 1963 it tackled the subject at length in its Annual Report, stating emphatically that ‘It is our duty to present artists of special eminence whom the public has a wish and a right to hear.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The company still did not yet have in its ranks singers able to take on roles such as Leonora, Donna Anna, Don Giovanni or Siegfried, all essential to core works audiences could reasonably expect to hear. British singers were being trained as fast as possible and constantly learning new roles but even then, the relevant singer for a part might be booked abroad, and audiences, in any case, enjoyed variety in casting.

Unfortunately, hiring foreign singers meant entering an international economy of supply and demand: if singers were not paid similar fees to those paid abroad, they would not come to London. Stars were undoubtedly expensive. Some were reported to be being paid as much as £1,000 a week at Covent Garden by the mid-1960s, at a time when the theatre was suffering a ‘grave deterioration’ in finances, a situation compounded by needing to undertake an unavoidable programme of rewiring and modernisation, including the replacement of wooden gallery benches with tip-up seats.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Accordingly, audiences had to pay more to hear star singers, but the Covent Garden management insisted in 1963 that the market could withstand price hikes for special casts. Indeed, it argued that, contrary to perception, it was not these that were leading to losses, but routine repertory performances, particularly of British works. Thus, ‘If special performances were abandoned and the programme confined to domestic repertory, the subsidy needed would not be less, it would be considerably greater.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1968 the company mulled over the possibility of hiring fewer foreign stars as a way of cutting costs but concluded that such a policy would be ‘a disastrous mistake’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Covent Garden was in the process of establishing itself as a great international house, and British audiences and visitors from overseas now expected to hear great international singers. Any backtracking on this policy would have negative implications for standards of performance, repertoire and receipts.

Some sectors of the press, however, regarded the shift towards internationalism as disadvantaging ordinary opera lovers. More special performances starring international stars meant fewer regular performances for those unable to pay inflated prices. Even the new shape of the season, run on a hybrid model partially along ‘stagione’ lines – where multiple performances of a single opera were scheduled in quick succession – was making it harder for ordinary people trying to access opera. It was difficult to persuade top-rank singers – a group which, by now, included the most talented British singers – to commit themselves to the long seasons demanded by a repertory system; thus, to accommodate them, short, concentrated runs of particular works had become a necessity.Footnote ¹¹¹ But prospective audience members visiting from afar and hoping to see a range of different operas would be disappointed, because no more than two would be put on within the space of a fortnight, a system that, the Daily Mail argued, ‘totally ignores everyone but the rich opera-lover who lives in London’.Footnote ¹¹²

While this was unfortunate, Solti was keen to diversify what an opera goer could see over the course of a complete season. Although the core repertoire remained firmly canonical, the most regularly performed works being Aida, La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Fidelio, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, unusual works were also being given limited runs.Footnote ¹¹³ Solti was keen to introduce more French and Slavonic works, and even to put on challenging works that would never have been contemplated previously, such as Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron, on the understanding that the work might sink or swim but giving it a chance was worth trying.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Surprisingly, it did attract reasonably large audiences: an average of 2,041 throughout its run in 1965–6 and 2,049 the following year, houses that were not unlike the average for a repertory work.Footnote ¹¹⁵ But the experiments did not always pay off. Walton’s Troilus and Cressida only averaged 951 audience members for each of five performances in 1963–4, and there was disappointingly poor attendance for Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismaelova (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), in what should have been a notable event: its first run in the West.Footnote ¹¹⁶

By the mid-1960s, Covent Garden was averaging 92 per cent capacity houses, demonstrating the popularity of opera in Britain during this period.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But ticket sales were not the only matter at stake: Solti was eager to ‘improve’ British operatic tastes, expressing a desire to make audiences ‘opera-minded as distinct from starstruck, though it will take a generation’; this corresponded with the Arts Council’s emphasis on art’s ‘improving potential’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Notwithstanding his ambitions, audiences were making it very clear that what they liked best was watching Callas or Sutherland in operas like La traviata.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As the Guardian reported, ‘The public are capricious and coy. They stay away from interesting new productions but when it’s a case of Callas … demand exceeds supply of seats to a point where quite rational people abuse the box office and accuse it of every imaginable crime.’Footnote ¹²⁰

Throughout the 1960s, the question of Covent Garden’s insufficient (as the theatre itself saw it) or excessively high (in the eyes of the wider world) subsidy remained pressing. The company’s level of subsidy was £500,000 at the start of the decade. This was a large sum but one that still remained too low for the theatre’s needs.Footnote ¹²¹ Subsidy would balloon to £1,250,000 by the end of the decade, but by then expenditure had soared to £2,250,000, with the company stating in its 1968–9 Annual Report that it was existing ‘from hand to mouth’.Footnote ¹²²

Despite the fact that arts subsidy in general was broadly accepted by politicians and commentators from both sides of the political divide at this time, Covent Garden was painfully aware of the special criticism it was likely to receive for being awarded the lion’s share of the available funds.Footnote ¹²³ Thus, it felt compelled to reiterate its case for subsidy repeatedly in annual reports, hoping to nip criticism in the bud. An argument presented in the 1962–3 report is worth quoting at length:

Such unabashed confidence in London as a great metropolitan centre, in the importance of cultivating a civilised life there, and in the benefits of art for art’s sake, with no reference to any utilitarian function, are striking. A defence of opera on these grounds would be unimaginable today. Striking, too, is the fact that opera – long regarded with suspicion as ‘foreign’ by the British – was being held up as central to the cultural activities that made the nation great. Opera, throughout the western world, the statement noted, was becoming increasingly internationalised in the jet age. Thus, if Covent Garden wanted to hold on to the best British singers whom it had painstakingly cultivated in the post-war years, it could not afford to be parochial. Rather, an international model, with casting opportunities for British as well as foreign stars, was the only way to go, and in order to provide this on a year-round basis, subsidy would have to be increased.

Practices in terms of language were constantly chopping and changing across the course of the 1960s and the company often found itself merely paying lip-service to the English-language policy.Footnote ¹²⁵ In 1964, Solti proposed that everything be presented in its original language with the exception of comic operas – for the linguistic immediacy the medium demanded – and Slavonic works (presumably on the assumption that while an audience member might have a smattering of French or German, Czech or Russian would be a stretch too far).Footnote ¹²⁶ A decisive moment came in 1968, when Sadler’s Wells relocated to the Coliseum on St Martin’s Lane. The fact that the two companies now found themselves in such close proximity offered Covent Garden an opportunity to resolve its language conundrum once and for all, as a means of differentiating itself from its new neighbour. By 1969, even the Arts Council was prepared to admit that ‘It felt impossible to reach the highest international level by using only British artists and singing only in English.’Footnote ¹²⁷ In this, and in other respects, Covent Garden was now a thoroughly international operation, while distinct in many ways from the luxurious ‘international seasons’ of the interwar period.

By the late 1960s, opera at Covent Garden had settled into a model that would remain relatively static thereafter. Over the course of the remainder of the twentieth century, the now renamed Royal Opera would persevere with this new international model. During the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and beyond, the House welcomed the same singers – from Luciano Pavarotti to Angela Gheorghiu – who could be seen at any of the world’s leading opera houses. But there was also a strong emphasis upon cultivating and hiring British singers who were also in demand abroad, from Thomas Allen to Rosalind Plowright. By 1970, the project of creating a core company of first-rate British singers had also been successfully achieved, Berlin writing to Lord Drogheda that ‘the British company and the singers we have trained have risen far beyond the hopes of realists, even fifteen years ago. … There is today a highly respected resident company at whom foreign Opera Houses cast eyes.’Footnote ¹²⁸ This was a new type of internationalism, in which excellence – in performing, direction and staging – was the priority, and in which British people could participate.

In some senses the abandonment of the idealistic post-war national model was regrettable. This brief venture, much publicised, had done good work in terms of combatting negative perceptions about Covent Garden, and opera more generally, being bound up with luxury, as well as providing hitherto unimaginable opportunities for British singers. Certainly, a generation of opera critics who had come to maturity in the idealistic post-war years would complain bitterly about the demise of the noble principle of ‘opera for the people’ that had briefly prevailed at Covent Garden, and grumble about foreign-language performances (demand for which they believed to be driven by snobbery), glamorous audiences and jet-setting principals.Footnote ¹²⁹

Ultimately, however, the company’s place in the international cultural pecking order mattered, and this depended upon cultivating higher artistic standards than could be achieved with British singers alone, setting an ambitious standard that other British companies that emerged in the post-war decades would increasingly seek to emulate, with beneficial results for audiences. Subsidy would always remain controversial, and the opera house maintained a glamorous allure that would ensure it always remained a ‘thing apart’ in the West End. But by the 1980s London could boast of having an institution that would have been unimaginable half a century earlier: one of the very best opera companies in the world. This was an achievement that had only been possible because the company had been prepared to forge a new type of international model, and to persuade audiences that internationalism could be a marker of high artistic quality, rather than something to be regarded with suspicion. The seeds of its success had been sown in the 1950s when, as a company Annual Report stated, ‘good opera, like all good art, is neither provincial nor national but universal in its scope and appeal’.Footnote ¹³⁰