The Royal Opera
The Royal Opera is a British opera company based in central London, resident at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Along with English National Opera, it is one of the two principal opera companies in London. Founded in 1946 as the Covent Garden Opera Company, the company had that title until 1968. It brought a long annual season and consistent management to a house that had previously hosted short seasons under a series of impresarios. Since its inception, it has shared the Royal Opera House with the dance company now known as The Royal Ballet. The two companies belong to an umbrella organisation, the Royal Ballet and Opera, which was known as the Royal Opera House prior to 2024.
When the company was formed, its policy was to perform all works in English, but since the late 1950s most operas have been performed in their original language. From the outset, performers have comprised a mixture of British and Commonwealth singers and international guest stars, but fostering the careers of singers from within the company was a consistent policy of the early years. Among the many guest performers have been Maria Callas, Plácido Domingo, Kirsten Flagstad, Hans Hotter, Birgit Nilsson, Luciano Pavarotti and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Among those who have risen to international prominence from the ranks of the company are Geraint Evans, Joan Sutherland, Kiri Te Kanawa and Jon Vickers.
The company's growth under the management of David Webster from modest beginnings to parity with the world's greatest opera houses was recognised by the grant of the title "The Royal Opera" in 1968. Under Webster's successor, John Tooley, appointed in 1970, The Royal Opera prospered, but after his retirement in 1988, there followed a period of instability and the closure of the Royal Opera House for rebuilding and restoration between 1997 and 1999. The 21st century has seen a stable managerial regime once more in place. The company has had seven music directors since its inception: Karl Rankl, Rafael Kubelík, Georg Solti, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink, Antonio Pappano and Jakub Hrůša.
History
Background
From the mid-19th century, opera had been presented on the site of Covent Garden's Royal Opera House, at first by Michael Costa's Royal Italian Opera company. After a fire, the new building opened in 1858 with The Royal English Opera company, which moved there from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. From the 1860s until the Second World War, various syndicates or individual impresarios presented short seasons of opera at the Royal Opera House, sung in the original language, with star singers and conductors. Pre-war opera was described by the historian Montague Haltrecht as "international, dressy and exclusive". During the war, the Royal Opera House was leased by its owners, Covent Garden Properties Ltd, to Mecca Ballrooms who used it profitably as a dance hall. Towards the end of the war, the owners approached the music publishers Boosey and Hawkes to see if they were interested in taking a lease of the building and staging opera once more. Boosey and Hawkes took a lease, and granted a sub-lease at generous terms to a not-for-profit charitable trust established to run the operation. The chairman of the trust was Lord Keynes.There was some pressure for a return to the pre-war regime of starry international seasons. Sir Thomas Beecham, who had presented many Covent Garden seasons between 1910 and 1939 confidently expected to do so again after the war. However, Boosey and Hawkes, and David Webster, whom they appointed as chief executive of the Covent Garden company, were committed to presenting opera all year round, in English with a resident company. It was widely assumed that this aim would be met by inviting the existing Sadler's Wells Opera Company to become resident at the Royal Opera House. Webster successfully extended just such an invitation to the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company, but he regarded the sister opera company as "parochial". He was determined to set up a new opera company of his own. 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.
Beginnings: 1946–1949
Webster's first priority was to appoint a musical director to build the company from scratch. He negotiated with Bruno Walter and Eugene Goossens, but neither of those conductors was willing to consider an opera company with no leading international stars. Webster appointed a little-known Austrian, Karl Rankl, to the post. Before the war, Rankl had acquired considerable experience in charge of opera companies in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. He accepted Webster's invitation to assemble and train the principals and chorus of a new opera company, alongside a permanent orchestra that would play in both operas and ballets.The new company made its debut in a joint presentation, together with the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company, of Purcell's The Fairy-Queen on 12 December 1946. The first production by the opera company alone was Carmen, on 14 January 1947. Reviews were favourable. The Times said:
All the members of the cast for the production were from Britain or the Commonwealth. Later in the season, one of England's few pre-war international opera stars, Eva Turner, appeared as Turandot. 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. Other international stars who were willing to re-learn their roles in English for the company in its early years included Kirsten Flagstad and Hans Hotter for The Valkyrie. 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. At first Rankl conducted all the productions; he was dismayed when eminent guest conductors including Beecham, Clemens Krauss and Erich Kleiber were later invited for prestige productions. By 1951 Rankl felt that he was no longer valued, and announced his resignation. In Haltrecht's view, the company that Rankl built up from nothing had outgrown him.
In the early years, the company sought to be innovative and widely accessible. Ticket prices were kept down: in the 1949 season 530 seats were available for each performance at two shillings and sixpence. In addition to the standard operatic repertory, the company presented operas by living composers such as Britten, Vaughan Williams, Bliss, and, later, Walton. The young stage director Peter Brook was put in charge of productions, bringing a fresh and sometimes controversial approach to stagings.
1950s
After Rankl's departure the company engaged a series of guest conductors while Webster sought a new musical director. His preferred candidates, Erich Kleiber, John Barbirolli, Josef Krips, Britten and Rudolf Kempe, were among the guests but none would take the permanent post. It was not until 1954 that Webster found a replacement for Rankl in Rafael Kubelík. 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". 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.File:Sutherland-delosAngeles-Gobbi-Evans.jpg|thumb|left|alt=four head and shoulders shots of opera stars out of make-up and as themselves|1950s stars, clockwise from top left, Joan Sutherland, Victoria de los Ángeles, Geraint Evans, Tito Gobbi
Despite Beecham's views, by the mid-1950s the Covent Garden company included many British and Commonwealth singers who were already or were soon to be much sought after by overseas opera houses. Among them were Joan Carlyle, Marie Collier, Geraint Evans, Michael Langdon, Elsie Morison, Amy Shuard, Joan Sutherland, Josephine Veasey and Jon Vickers. Nevertheless, as Lords Goodman and Harewood put it in a 1969 report for the Arts Council, "s time went on the operatic centre of British life began to take on an international character. This meant that, while continuing to develop the British artists, it was felt impossible to reach the highest international level by using only British artists or singing only in English". Guest singers from abroad in the 1950s included Maria Callas, Boris Christoff, Victoria de los Ángeles, Tito Gobbi and Birgit Nilsson. Kubelík introduced Janáček's Jenůfa to British audiences, sung in English by a mostly British cast.
The verdict of the public on whether operas should be given in translation or the original was clear. In 1959, the opera house stated in its annual report, "he percentage attendance at all opera in English was 72 per cent; attendance at the special productions marked by higher prices was 91 per cent … it is 'international' productions with highly priced seats that reduce our losses". The opera in English policy was never formally renounced. 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".
By the end of the 1950s, Covent Garden was generally regarded as approaching the excellence of the world's greatest opera companies. Its sister ballet company had achieved international recognition and was granted a royal charter in 1956, changing its title to "The Royal Ballet"; the opera company was close to reaching similar eminence. Two landmark productions greatly enhanced its reputation. In 1957, Covent Garden presented the first substantially complete professional staging at any opera house of Berlioz's vast opera The Trojans, directed by John Gielgud and conducted by Kubelík. The Times commented, "It has never been a success; but it is now". In 1958 the present theatre's centenary was marked by Luchino Visconti's production of Verdi's Don Carlos, with Vickers, Gobbi, Christoff, Gré Brouwenstijn and Fedora Barbieri, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini. The work was then a rarity, and had hitherto been widely regarded as impossible to stage satisfactorily, but Visconti's production was a triumph.