English National Opera
The company's origins were in the late 19th century, when the philanthropist Emma Cons, later assisted by her niece Lilian Baylis, presented theatrical and operatic performances at the Old Vic, for the benefit of local people.
In 1889, Emma Cons, a Victorian philanthropist who ran the Old Vic theatre in a working-class area of London, began presenting regular fortnightly performances of opera excerpts.
[14] Baylis strove to improve operatic standards, while at the same time fending off attempts by Sir Thomas Beecham to absorb the opera company into a joint enterprise with Covent Garden, where he was in command.
[15] At first, the apparent financial security of the offer appeared attractive, but friends and advisers such as Edward J. Dent and Clive Carey convinced Bayliss that it was not in the interests of her regular audience.
[16] This view received strong support from the press; The Times wrote: The Old Vic began by offering opera of some sort to people who hardly knew what the word meant ... under a wise, fostering guidance it has gradually worked upwards ...Any kind of amalgamation which made it the poor relation of the 'Grand' season would be disastrous.
However, for both aesthetic and financial reasons, by 1934, the Old Vic had become the home of the spoken drama, while Sadler's Wells housed both the opera and a ballet company, the latter co-founded by Baylis and Ninette de Valois in 1930.
The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the official government body charged with dispensing the modest public subsidy recently introduced, considered its options on the future of opera in Britain.
[27] Peter Grimes opened in June 1945, to both public and critical acclaim;[28] its box-office takings matched or exceeded those for La bohème and Madame Butterfly, which the company was concurrently staging.
"[34] Carey left in 1947, replaced in January 1948 by a triumvirate of James Robertson as musical director, Michael Mudie as his assistant conductor and Norman Tucker in charge of administration.
[41] When it became clear that this would require the Sadler's Wells company to tour for 30 weeks every year, effectively removing its presence on the London opera scene, Tucker, his deputy Stephen Arlen, and his musical director Alexander Gibson resigned.
[56] The company, retaining the title "Sadler's Wells Opera", opened at the Coliseum on 21 August 1968, with a new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni, directed by Sir John Gielgud.
Byam Shaw commented "The one major setback the Sadler's Wells Opera Company suffered from its transplant was that unheeding taxi drivers kept on taking their patrons up to Rosebery Avenue".
[73] The three of them favoured productions described, contrastingly, by Elder as "groundbreaking, risky, probing and theatrically effective",[74] and by the director Nicholas Hytner as "Euro-bollocks that never has to be comprehensible to anybody but the people sitting out there conceiving.
In the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Barry Millington has described the 'Powerhouse' style as "arresting images of dislocated reality, an inexhaustible repertory of stage contrivances, a determination to explore the social and psychological issues latent in the works, and above all an abundant sense of theatricality."
As examples, Millington mentioned Rusalka (1983), with its Edwardian nursery setting and Freudian undertones, and Hansel and Gretel (1987), its dream pantomime peopled by fantasy figures from the children's imagination ... Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1987) and Wozzeck (1990) exemplified an approach to production in which grotesque caricature jostles with forceful emotional engagement.
[81] In 1984 ENO toured the United States; the travelling company, led by Elder, consisted of 360 people; they performed Gloriana, War and Peace, The Turn of the Screw, Rigoletto and Patience.
This was the first British company to be invited to appear at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where Patience received a standing ovation and Miller's production of Rigoletto, depicting the characters as mafiosi, was greeted with a mixture of enthusiasm and booing.
[95] Productions in the 1990s included the company's first stagings of Beatrice and Benedict (1990), Wozzeck (1990), Jenůfa (1994), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1995), Die Soldaten (1996), Doctor Ox's Experiment (1998) and Dialogues of the Carmelites (1999).
The most extreme case was a production of Don Giovanni directed by Calixto Bieito in 2001, despised by critics and public alike; Michael Kennedy described it as "a new nadir in vulgar abuse of a masterpiece,"[99] and other reviewers agreed with him.
[106] He attracted newspaper headlines with unusual operatic events, described by admirers as "unexpected coups" and by detractors as "stunts";[107] a performance of the third act of The Valkyrie played to 20,000 rock music fans at the Glastonbury Festival.
After concert performances over the previous three seasons,[110] the four operas of the cycle were staged at the Coliseum in 2004 and 2005 in productions by Phyllida Lloyd, with designs by Richard Hudson, in a new translation by Jeremy Sams.
[111] The first instalments of the cycle were criticised as poorly sung and conducted, but by the time Twilight of the Gods was staged in 2005, matters were thought to have improved: "Paul Daniel's command of the score is more authoritative than could have been predicted from his uneven accounts of the previous operas.
[136] Operas advertised under this banner were Don Giovanni, La traviata, Michel van der Aa's Sunken Garden (performed at the Barbican) and Philip Glass's The Perfect American.
The council recognised that the company was "capable of extraordinary artistic work", but "we have serious concerns about their governance and business model and we expect them to improve or they could face removal of funding.
[138] Critical and box-office successes in the company's 2014–2015 season included The Mastersingers, which won an Olivier Award for best new opera production, and Sweeney Todd, with Bryn Terfel in the title role.
ENO has commissioned more than a dozen operas by composers including Gordon Crosse, Iain Hamilton, Jonathan Harvey, Alfred Schnittke, Gavin Bryars, David Sawer, Asian Dub Foundation and Nico Muhly.
Subsequent world premieres have included The Mines of Sulphur (1965), The Mask of Orpheus (1986), The Silver Tassie (1999), and works by Malcolm Williamson, Iain Hamilton, David Blake, Robin Holloway, Julian Anderson and Stephen Oliver.
[81][165] British stage premieres include operas by Verdi (Simon Boccanegra, 1948), Janáček (Káťa Kabanová, 1951), Stravinsky (Oedipus rex, 1960), Prokofiev (War and Peace, 1972) and Philip Glass (Akhnaten, 1985, among others).
Those in which the chorus and orchestra of the ENO appear are Lulu, The Makropoulos Affair, Werther, Dialogues of the Carmelites, The Barber of Seville, Rigoletto, Ernani, Otello and Falstaff, as well as the live recordings of The Ring and The Mastersingers.
But ENO and its audiences will be the poorer for his forced departure.Alan Blyth wrote: Nicholas Payne's employment of directors who are often seemingly more concerned to indulge their egos in reinterpreting the operas they have been invited to direct than in fulfilling the wishes of the librettist and the composer has been the main reason for falling attendance at the London Coliseum.
