The Royal Opera

thumbnail|alt=exterior of a neo-classical theatre|The [[Royal Opera House, home of 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 (so named in 1892), 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 (and ballet) 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. He was determined to set up a new opera company of his own.

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 first production by the opera company alone was Carmen, on 14 January 1947. Reviews were favourable. The Times said:

thumb|right|alt=head and shoulders image of a bald, clean-shaven man of middle age|upright|Erich Kleiber

All the members of the cast for the production were from Britain or the Commonwealth. Davis conducted more than 30 operas during his 15-year tenure, but, he said, "people like [Lorin] Maazel, Abbado and [Riccardo] Muti would only come for new productions". Unlike Rankl, and like Solti, Davis wanted the world's best conductors to come to Covent Garden. In The Times, John Higgins wrote, "One of the hallmarks of the Davis regime was the flood of international conductors who suddenly arrived at Covent Garden. While Davis has been in control perhaps only three big names have been missing from the roster: Karajan, Bernstein and Barenboim". Among the high-profile guests conducting Davis's company were Carlos Kleiber for performances of Der Rosenkavalier (1974), Elektra (1977), La bohème (1979) and Otello (1980), and Abbado conducting Un ballo in maschera (1975), starring Plácido Domingo and Katia Ricciarelli.

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. the tenors Carlo Bergonzi, Nicolai Gedda and Luciano Pavarotti and the bass Gottlob Frick. British singers appearing with the company included Janet Baker, Heather Harper, John Tomlinson and Richard Van Allan. 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.

1987 to 2002

thumb|upright|right|alt=bald man in middle age, smiling in semi-profile|Bernard Haitink, music director 1985 to 2002

To succeed Davis, the Covent Garden board chose Bernard Haitink, who was then the musical director of the Glyndebourne Festival. He was highly regarded for the excellence of his performances, though his repertory was not large. Musically and dramatically the company prospered into the 1990s. A 1993 production of Die Meistersinger, conducted by Haitink and starring John Tomlinson, Thomas Allen, Gösta Winbergh and Nancy Gustafson, was widely admired, as was Richard Eyre's 1994 staging of La traviata, conducted by Solti and propelling Angela Gheorghiu to stardom.

For some time, purely musical considerations were overshadowed by practical and managerial crises at the Royal Opera House. Sir John Tooley retired as general director in 1988, and his post was given to the television executive Jeremy Isaacs. 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. The uneasy relations between Isaacs and his colleagues, notably Haitink, were also damaging.|group= n The Daily Telegraph commented, "For years, the Opera House was a byword for mismanagement and chaos. Its innermost workings were exposed to public ridicule by the BBC fly-on-the-wall series The House".

In 1995, The Royal Opera announced a "Verdi Festival", of which the driving force was the company's leading Verdian, Sir Edward Downes, by now returned from Australia. The aim was to present all Verdi's operas, either on stage or in concert performance, between 1995 and the centenary of Verdi's death, 2001. Those operas substantially rewritten by the composer in his long career, such as Simon Boccanegra, were given in both their original and revised versions. The festival did not manage to stage a complete Verdi cycle; the closure of the opera house disrupted many plans, but as The Guardian put it, "Downes still managed to introduce, either under his own baton or that of others, most of the major works and many of the minor ones by the Italian master."

The most disruptive event of the decade for both the opera and the ballet companies was the closure of the Royal Opera House between 1997 and 1999 for major rebuilding. The Independent on Sunday asserted that Isaacs "hopelessly mismanaged the closure of the Opera House during its redevelopment".|group= n

After Isaacs left, there was a period of managerial instability, with three chief executives in three years. Isaacs's successor, Genista McIntosh, resigned in May 1997 after five months, citing ill-health. Her post was filled by Mary Allen, who moved into the job from the Arts Council. Allen's selection did not comply with the council's rules for such appointments, and following a critical House of Commons Select committee report on the management of the opera house she resigned in March 1998, as did the entire board of the opera house, including the chairman, Lord Chadlington. A new board appointed Michael Kaiser as general director in September 1998. He oversaw the restoration of the two companies' finances and the re-opening of the opera house. 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.

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. When the house reopened in December 1999, magnificently restored, Falstaff was the opera given on the opening night, conducted by Haitink, once more with Terfel in the title role.

2002 to date

thumb|left|alt=picture of elderly man to the left presenting a younger man to the right with an award|[[Antonio Pappano (right), music director since 2002, with the Italian president Giorgio Napolitano]]

Following years of disruption and conflict, stability was restored to the opera house and its two companies after the appointment in May 2001 of a new chief executive, Tony Hall, formerly a senior executive at the BBC. The following year Antonio Pappano succeeded Haitink as music director of The Royal Opera. Following the redevelopment, a second, smaller auditorium, the Linbury Studio Theatre has been made available for small-scale productions by The Royal Opera and The Royal Ballet, for visiting companies, and for work produced in the ROH2 programme, which supports new work and developing artists. The Royal Opera encourages young singers at the start of their careers with the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme; participants are salaried members of the company and receive daily coaching in all aspects of opera.

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. Among the composers whose works were premiered were Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Lorin Maazel, and Nicholas Maw.

Productions in the first five years of Pappano's tenure ranged from Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (2004) to Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (2003) starring Thomas Allen and Felicity Palmer. Pappano's Ring cycle, begun in 2004 and staged as a complete tetralogy in 2007, was praised like Haitink's before it for its musical excellence; it was staged in a production described by Richard Morrison in The Times as "much derided for mixing the homely … the wacky and the cosmic". During Pappano's tenure, his predecessors Davis and Haitink have both returned as guests. Haitink conducted Parsifal, with Tomlinson, Christopher Ventris and Petra Lang in 2007, and Davis conducted four Mozart operas between 2002 and 2011, Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos in 2007 and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel in 2008. In 2007, Sir Simon Rattle conducted a new production of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande starring Simon Keenlyside, Angelika Kirchschlager and Gerald Finley.

The company visited Japan in 2010, presenting a new production of Manon and the Eyre production of La traviata. While the main company was abroad, a smaller company remained in London, presenting Niobe, Così fan tutte and Don Pasquale at Covent Garden.

In 2010, the Royal Opera House received a government subsidy of just over £27m, compared with a subsidy of £15m in 1998. This sum was divided between the opera and ballet companies and the cost of running the building.

In the latter part of the 2000s, The Royal Opera gave an average of 150 performances each season, lasting from September to July, of about 20 operas, nearly half of which were new productions. Productions in the 2011–12 season included a new opera (Miss Fortune) by Judith Weir, 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. From the start of the 2011–12 season Kasper Holten became Director of The Royal Opera, joined by John Fulljames as Associate Director of Opera. At the end of the 2011–12 season ROH2, the contemporary arm of the Royal Opera House, was closed. Responsibility for contemporary programming was split between the Studio programmes of The Royal Opera and The Royal Ballet.

Since the start of the 2012–13 season, The Royal Opera has continued to mount around 20 productions and around seven new productions each season. The 2012–13 season opened with a revival of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Keith Warner; new productions that season included Robert le diable, directed by Laurent Pelly, Eugene Onegin, directed by Holten, La donna del lago, directed by Fulljames, and the UK premiere of Written on Skin, composed by George Benjamin and directed by Katie Mitchell. Productions by the Studio Programme included the world premiere of David Bruce's The Firework-Maker's Daughter (inspired by Philip Pullman's novel of the same name), directed by Fulljames, and the UK stage premiere of Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Ramin Gray.

New productions in the 2013–14 season included Les vêpres siciliennes, directed by Stefan Herheim, Parsifal, directed by Stephen Langridge, Don Giovanni, directed by Holten, Die Frau ohne Schatten, directed by Claus Guth, and Manon Lescaut, directed by Jonathan Kent, and in the Studio Programme the world premiere of Luke Bedford's Through His Teeth, and the London premiere of Luca Francesconi's Quartett (directed by Fulljames). This season also saw the first production of a three-year collaboration between The Royal Opera and Welsh National Opera, staging Moses und Aron in 2014, Richard Ayre's Peter Pan in 2015 and a new commission in 2016 to celebrate WNO's 70th anniversary. 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. 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. The production was revived in February 2015.

In March 2021, the ROH announced simultaneously the latest extension of Pappano's contract as its music director until the 2023-2024 season, and the scheduled conclusion of Pappano's tenure as ROH music director at the close of the 2023-2024 season.

Jakub Hrůša first guest-conducted at the ROH in February 2018, in a production of Carmen. He returned to the ROH in April 2022 to conduct a production of Lohengrin. In October 2022, the ROH announced the appointment of Hrůša as its next music director, effective in September 2025. He took the title of music director designate with immediate effect. Hrůša and Pappano are scheduled to share responsibilities in the 2024-2025 transition season.

From July to August 2024, Symphonic Horizons by Professor Brian Cox was performed at the ROH.

On February 11, 2025, the ROH premiered "Festen," a new opera composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage with a libretto by Lee Hall, nominated for Best New Opera Production at the Laurence Olivier Awards.

Managerial and musical heads, 1946 to date

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

!Royal Opera House Chief executive !! Opera company Music Director !! Director of Opera !! Notes and references

| rowspan="7" | 1946–1970 David Webster

| 1946–1951 Karl Rankl

| rowspan="3" | none

| style="text-align: left;" | 1946–1980 Chief executive titled "General Administrator"

| none

| –

| 1955–1958 Rafael Kubelík

| –

| rowspan="2" style="text-align: center;" | none

| 1959–1960 Lord Harewood

| style="text-align: left;" | Harewood's title was "Controller of Opera Planning"

| rowspan="2" | 1960–1962 Bernard Keeffe

| style="text-align: left;" | Keeffe's title was "Controller of Opera Planning"

| rowspan="3" | 1961–1971 Georg Solti

| –

| rowspan="2" | 1962–1971 Joan Ingpen

| style="text-align: left;" | Ingpen's title was "Controller of Opera Planning"

| rowspan="5" | 1970–1988 John Tooley

| style="text-align: left;" | From 1980, Tooley's title was "General Director"

| rowspan="3" | 1971–1986 Colin Davis

| none

| –

| 1973–1981 Helga Schmidt

| style="text-align: left;" | Schmidt's title was first "Head of Opera Planning" then "Artistic Administrator"

| 1983–1987 Peter Katona

| style="text-align: left;" | Katona's title was "Artistic Administrator" He is currently "Director of Casting"

| rowspan="8" | 1987–2002 Bernard Haitink

| rowspan="2" | 1987–1993 Paul Findlay

| style="text-align: left;" | Since the 1980s, the title "Music Director" has been adopted in place of "Musical Director" Findlay's title was "Opera Director"

| rowspan="2" | 1988–1996 Jeremy Isaacs

| style="text-align: left;" | Isaac's title was "General Director"

| rowspan="3" | 1993–1998 Nicholas Payne

| style="text-align: left;" | Payne's title was "Opera Director"

| January – May 1997 Genista McIntosh

| style="text-align: left;" | McIntosh's title was "Chief executive"

| September 1997 – March 1998 Mary Allen

| style="text-align: left;" | Allen's title was "Chief executive"

| September 1998 – June 2000 Michael Kaiser

| none

| style="text-align: left;" | Kaiser's title was "Chief executive"

| none

| rowspan="3" | 2000–2011 Elaine Padmore

| style="text-align: left;" | Padmore's title was "Director of Opera"

| rowspan="3" | May 2001 – 2013 Tony Hall

| style="text-align: left;" | Hall's title was "Chief executive"

| rowspan="5" | 2002–2024 Antonio Pappano

| –

| rowspan="2" | 2011–2017 Kasper Holten

| style="text-align: left;" | Holten's title was "Director of Opera"

| rowspan="4" | 2013–present Alex Beard

| style="text-align: left;" | Beard's title is "Chief executive"

| rowspan="3" | 2017–present Oliver Mears

| style="text-align: left;" | Mears's title is "Director of Opera"

The Royal Opera

History

Background

Beginnings: 1946–1949

1987 to 2002

2002 to date

Managerial and musical heads, 1946 to date

See also

References

Notes

Footnotes

Sources

Further reading

External links