The Royal Opera
Among the many guest performers have been Maria Callas, Plácido Domingo, Kirsten Flagstad, Hans Hotter, Birgit Nilsson, Luciano Pavarotti and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
The company has had six music directors since its inception: Karl Rankl, Rafael Kubelík, Georg Solti, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink and Antonio Pappano.
[13] The British government had recently begun to give funds to subsidise the arts, and Webster negotiated an ad hoc grant of £60,000 and an annual subsidy of £25,000, enabling him to proceed.
[22] For the company's second season, eminent singers from continental Europe were recruited, including Ljuba Welitsch, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Paolo Silveri, Rudolf Schock and Set Svanholm.
[24] Nevertheless, even as early as 1948, the opera in English policy was weakening; the company was obliged to present some Wagner performances in German to recruit leading exponents of the main roles.
His preferred candidates, Erich Kleiber, John Barbirolli, Josef Krips, Britten and Rudolf Kempe, were among the guests but none would take the permanent post.
[33] Kubelík announced immediately that he was in favour of continuing the policy of singing in the vernacular: "Everything that the composer has written should be understood by the audience; and that is not possible if the opera is sung in a language with which they are not familiar".
[n 6] This provoked a public onslaught by Beecham, who continued to maintain that it was impossible to produce more than a handful of English-speaking opera stars, and that importing singers from continental Europe was the only way to achieve first-rate results.
[36] Nevertheless, as Lords Goodman and Harewood put it in a 1969 report for the Arts Council, "[A]s time went on the operatic centre of British life began to take on an international character.
[37] Guest singers from mainland Europe in the 1950s included Maria Callas, Boris Christoff, Victoria de los Ángeles, Tito Gobbi and Birgit Nilsson.
On this subject, Peter Heyworth wrote in The Observer in 1960 that Covent Garden had "quickly learned the secret that underlies the genius of British institutions for undisturbed change: it continued to pay lip service to a policy that it increasingly ignored".
[51] With his previous experience in charge of the Munich and Frankfurt opera houses, he was at first uncertain that Covent Garden, not yet consistently reaching the top international level, was a post he wanted.
Solti, however, was an advocate of opera in the vernacular,[55][n 9] and promoted the development of British and Commonwealth singers in the company, frequently casting them in his recordings and important productions in preference to overseas artists.
[55][n 10] By 1967, The Times said, "Patrons of Covent Garden today automatically expect any new production, and indeed any revival, to be as strongly cast as anything at the Met in New York, and as carefully presented as anything in Milan or Vienna".
[80] His defection, and the departure to Australian Opera of the staff conductor Edward Downes, a noted Verdi expert, left the company weakened on both production and musical sides.
[82] His first production after taking over was a well-received Le nozze di Figaro, in which Kiri Te Kanawa achieved immediate stardom,[83] but booing was heard at a "disastrous" Nabucco in 1971,[84] and his conducting of Wagner's Ring was at first compared unfavourably with that of his predecessor.
[84] Under Davis, the opera house introduced promenade performances, giving, as Bernard Levin wrote, "an opportunity for those (particularly the young, of course) who could not normally afford the price of stalls tickets to sample the view from the posher quarters at the trifling cost of £3 and a willingness to sit on the floor".
[90] In addition to the standard repertoire, Davis conducted such operas as Berg's Lulu and Wozzeck, Tippett's The Knot Garden and The Ice Break, and Alexander Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg and Eine florentinische Tragödie.
[86] Among the star guest singers during the Davis years were the sopranos Montserrat Caballé and Leontyne Price,[91] the tenors Carlo Bergonzi, Nicolai Gedda and Luciano Pavarotti[92] and the bass Gottlob Frick.
[94] Davis's tenure, at that time the longest in The Royal Opera's history, closed in July 1986 not with a gala, but, at his insistence, with a promenade performance of Fidelio with cheap admission prices.
Tooley later forsook his customary reticence and pronounced the Isaacs period a disaster, citing poor management that failed to control inflated manning levels – with a consequent steep rise in costs and ticket prices.
[98] Isaacs was widely blamed for the poor public relations arising from the 1996 BBC television series The House, in which cameras were permitted to film the day-to-day backstage life of the opera and ballet companies and the running of the theatre.
[98] Haitink, dismayed by events, threatened to leave, but was persuaded to stay and keep the opera company going in a series of temporary homes in London theatres and concert halls.
[95] A semi-staged Ring cycle at the Royal Albert Hall gained superlative reviews and won many new admirers for Haitink and the company, whose members included Tomlinson, Anne Evans and Hildegard Behrens.
He was widely regarded as a success, and there was some surprise when he left in June 2000 after less than two years to run the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.[109] The last operatic music to be heard in the old house had been the finale of Falstaff, conducted by Solti with the singers led by Bryn Terfel, in a joint opera and ballet farewell gala in July 1997.
[114] In addition to the standard works of the operatic repertoire, The Royal Opera has presented many less well known pieces since 2002, including Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, Massenet's Cendrillon, Prokofiev's The Gambler, Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride, Rossini's Il turco in Italia, Steffani's Niobe, and Tchaikovsky's The Tsarina's Slippers.
[119] Productions in the first five years of Pappano's tenure ranged from Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (2004)[120] to Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (2003) starring Thomas Allen and Felicity Palmer.
[130] Productions in the 2011–12 season included a new opera (Miss Fortune) by Judith Weir,[131] and the first performances of The Trojans at Covent Garden since 1990, conducted by Pappano, and starring Bryan Hymel, Eva-Maria Westbroek and Anna Caterina Antonacci.
[150] Other events this season included The Royal Opera's first collaboration with Shakespeare's Globe, Holten directing L'Ormindo in the newly opened Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
[151] In The Guardian, Tim Ashley wrote, "A more exquisite evening would be hard to imagine"; Dominic Dromgoole, director of the playhouse expressed the hope that the partnership with the Royal Opera would become an annual fixture.
