Welsh National Opera
In its early days, the company gave a single week's annual season in Cardiff, gradually extending its schedule to become an all-year-round operation, with its own salaried chorus and orchestra.
Its most frequent venues other than Cardiff are Llandudno in Wales and Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Plymouth, and Southampton in England.
A local newspaper commented that it was remarkable that "a race of people to whom vocal music is a ruling passion should not generations ago have established a permanent national opera".
The company, predominantly amateur with some professional guest singers from the London stage, gave numerous performances of Parry's Blodwen and Arienwen, composed in 1878 and 1890 respectively.
[5] It presented week-long annual seasons of popular operas including Faust, Carmen and Il trovatore, and like its predecessor was mainly an amateur body, with professional guest principals.
"[20] By this time the company had expanded its repertoire to take in Carmen, La traviata, Madame Butterfly, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Bartered Bride and Die Fledermaus.
The shackles of puritanism, which had kept this country from an art-form perfectly suited to its national talents and predilections (for histrionics and dressing-up are as natural to the Welsh as singing) had been broken for ever".
[29] A reviewer in The Musical Times commented on potential difficulties in assembling the wholly amateur chorus for performances beyond daily travelling range of their day jobs.
[37] Leading roles were taken by rising stars such as John Shirley-Quirk, Gwyneth Jones, Thomas Allen, Josephine Barstow and Margaret Price, the last of whom made her operatic debut with the company in 1962.
[38] Established singers guesting with the company included Geraint Evans who played the title role in Don Pasquale in 1966, and Ian Wallace in the same part the following year.
[37] At the end of the 1960s the main WNO company, now a year-round operation, consisted of 8 salaried principal singers, 57 guest soloists and a chorus of 90 amateurs and 32 professionals.
As well as the Bournemouth players, the company engaged the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony and Ulster orchestras for different venues.
[37] A further broadening of the repertoire took place in the 1970s: in 1971 WNO staged the first performances in Britain of Berg's Lulu, directed by Michael Geliot, who had succeeded Moody in 1969.
[37] In collaboration with the company's musical director James Lockhart, Geliot is credited by The Times with introducing new young singers and "directing a host of groundbreaking productions" before leaving in 1978.
… The company's greatest virtue is that its work is dedicated above all to the service of composers and audiences, and not to some abstract notion of "prestige" nor to the vanity or ambition of individuals, and in this it is almost unique.
[44] The company returned to London with its participation in the Amoco Festival of Opera at the Dominion Theatre in 1979, presenting The Makropoulos Case, The Magic Flute, Ernani, Madame Butterfly, and Tristan and Isolde to capacity audiences.
[45] The company's traditional preference for the Italian repertoire was partly redressed during the decade: productions include WNO's first staging of a Richard Strauss opera, Elektra, in 1978.
[47][n 3] Among the guest artists who appeared with the company in the 1970s were the baritone Tito Gobbi, as Falstaff (1972),[44] the sopranos Elisabeth Söderström as Emilia in The Makropoulos Case (1978) and Anne Evans as Senta in The Flying Dutchman (1972),[49] and the conductors James Levine (Aida, 1970) and Reginald Goodall (Tristan and Isolde, 1979).
Das Rheingold, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung were conducted by the company's musical director, Richard Armstrong; Die Walküre (1984) was conducted by Goodall; it was seen as a coup for the company to secure his services – he was described by The Guardian as the greatest living Wagnerian conductor[53] – but the casting of the whole cycle was criticised for some serious weaknesses among the principal singers, and reviewers were generally unimpressed by Göran Järvefelt's production.
Boyd mentions Andrei Serban's Eugene Onegin (1980) among the successes and Lucian Pintilie's Carmen (1983) and Ruth Berghaus's Don Giovanni (1984) as productions that received more mixed responses.
"[63][n 5] McMaster resigned in 1991, having led the company to international status, with performances at La Scala, Milan; the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and in Tokyo.
[68] In The Observer, Michael Ratcliffe called the company "the most popular, populist and consistently successful arts organisation ever to come out of Wales ... with the loyalty and affection of audiences in Cardiff and across England … 'The people's opera' is not a myth.
[70] The company played three short seasons at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the mid-1990s, featuring Tristan und Isolde and La favorita in 1993, The Yeomen of the Guard in 1995, and The Rake's Progress and the jubilee double bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci in 1996.
A financial crisis had led to redundancies in the orchestra and the curtailment of the touring schedule; the conservative works chosen for 2001–02 were condemned by the press as "the dullest programme in recent memory"; and Rizzi was about to be replaced by a young and untried successor, Tugan Sokhiev.
Rizzi agreed to reorganise his schedule, and, to public and critical acclaim, returned to the musical directorship in time to prepare the company for its long-awaited move into a permanent base in Cardiff.
[80] It's a long haul, if you go by the clock – into the theatre at four, out at ten – but if you go by the exhilaration surging through your veins during this Welsh National Opera triumph, it's an extended moment of operatic bliss that you never want to end.
In July 2024, WNO announced the appointments of Adele Thomas and Sarah Crabtree as joint holders of the posts of general director and chief executive officer, effective January 2025.
[89] Although the chorus and orchestra of Welsh National Opera have appeared on many commercial recordings, often featuring regular WNO soloists, there have been few sets, either audio or video, of the company's own productions.
[97] For the WNO jubilee in 1996, Decca drew on some of its studio recordings for a celebratory CD set with contributions from many soloists who had appeared onstage with the company and some who had not, the latter including Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Montserrat Caballé and Thomas Hampson.
Phyllida Lloyd's production of Poulenc's The Carmelites for WNO won the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera in 1999, winning jointly with ENO as co-producers.
