Royal Opera House

The Floral Hall of the Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House is an opera house and performing arts venue in London. It is also sometimes referred to as "Covent Garden" after the London neighbourhood in which it is located. The building serves as the home of the Royal Opera, the Royal Ballet and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House.

The current edifice is the third theatre on the site. The façade, foyer and auditorium date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from a reconstruction in the 1990s. The Royal Opera House seats 2,268 people and consists of four tiers of boxes and balconies and the Amphiteatre gallery. The proscenium is 12.20m wide and 14.80m high.

The main auditorium is a Grade I listed building. [1] [2]

History

The Davenant Patent

A picture of the first theatre drawn shortly before it burned down in 1808.

The foundation of the Royal Opera House lies in the letters patent awarded by Charles II to Sir William Davenant in 1660, allowing Davenant to operate one of only two patent theatre companies (The Duke's Company) in London. The letters patent remained in the possession of the Opera House until shortly after the First World War, when the document was sold to a north American university library.

The first theatre

In 1728, John Rich, an actor and manager, commissioned The Beggar's Opera from John Gay. The success of the venture provided the capital with its first Theatre Royal (designed by Edward Shepherd) at the site, which opened on December 7, 1732.

For the first hundred years or so of its history the theatre was primarily a playhouse; the Letters Patent granted by Charles II had given Covent Garden and Drury Lane virtually exclusive rights to present spoken drama in London.

The first serious musical works to be heard at Covent Garden were the operas of Handel. From 1735 until his death in 1759 he gave regular seasons there, and many of his operas and oratorios were written for Covent Garden or had their first London performances there. He bequeathed his organ to John Rich, and it was placed in a prominent position on the stage. Unfortunately, it was among many valuable items lost in a fire that destroyed the theatre in 1808.

The auditorium of the second theatre shortly after opening.

The second theatre

Rebuilding began in December of the same year, and the second Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (designed by Robert Smirke) opened on September 18, 1809 with a performance of Macbeth followed by a musical entertainment called The Quaker. The management raised seat prices to help recoup the cost of rebuilding, but the move was so unpopular that audiences disrupted performances by beating sticks, hissing, booing and dancing. The Old Price Riots lasted over two months, and the management was finally forced to accede to the audience's demands.

During this time, entertainments were varied; opera and ballet were presented, but not exclusively. In 1843, the Theatres Act broke the patent theatres' monopoly of drama. At that time Her Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket was the main centre of ballet and opera, but after a dispute with the management in 1846 Michael Costa, conductor at Her Majesty's, transferred his allegiance to Covent Garden, bringing most of the company with him. The auditorium was completely remodelled and the theatre reopened as the Royal Italian Opera on April 6, 1847 with a performance of Rossini's Semiramide.

The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in the 1820s.

The third theatre

On March 5, 1856, the theatre was again destroyed by fire. Work on the third and present theatre (designed by Edward Middleton Barry) eventually started in 1857 and the new building opened on May 15, 1858 with a performance of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. The theatre became the Royal Opera House in 1892 and the number of French and German works in the repertory increased. Winter and summer seasons of opera and ballet were given, and the theatre was also used for other purposes such as pantomime, recitals and political meetings.

During the First World War the theatre was requisitioned by the Ministry of Works for use as a furniture repository. During the Second World War it became a dance hall. There was a possibility that it would remain so after the war but, following lengthy negotiations, the music publishers Boosey and Hawkes acquired the lease of the building.

David Webster was appointed General Administrator, and Sadler's Wells Ballet was invited to become the resident ballet company. The Covent Garden Opera Trust was created, which laid out plans "to establish Covent Garden as the national centre of opera and ballet, employing British artists in all departments, wherever that is consistent with the maintenance of the best possible standards..." (as quoted in Rosenthal, below)

The Royal Opera House reopened on February 20, 1946 with a performance of The Sleeping Beauty in an extravagant new production designed by Oliver Messel. Webster, with his music director Karl Rankl, immediately began to build a resident company. In December, 1946, they shared their first production, Purcell's The Fairy-Queen, with the ballet company. On January 14, 1947 the Covent Garden Opera Company gave its first performance of Bizet's Carmen.

Reconstruction in the 1990s

Several renovations had taken place to parts of the house in the 1960s, including improvements to the amphitheatre and an extension in the rear, but it became increasingly clear that the House needed some major overhauling.

In 1975 the Labour government gave land adjacent to the Royal Opera House for a long-overdue modernisation, refurbishment and extension. By 1995, sufficient funds had been raised to enable the company to embark upon a major reconstruction of the building, which took place between 1996 and 2000. This involved the demolition of almost the whole site except for the auditorium itself, including several adjacent buildings to make room for a major increase in the overall scale of the complex. In terms of volume, well over half of the complex is new.

The new venue has the same traditional horseshoe-shaped auditorium as before, but with greatly improved technical, rehearsal, office and educational facilities, a new studio theatre called the Linbury Theatre, and much more public space. The inclusion of the adjacent old Floral Hall, long a part of the old Covent Garden Market but in general disrepair for many years, into the actual opera house created a new and extensive public gathering place. The venue is now claimed by the ROH to be the most modern theatre facility in Europe.

Opera at the Royal Opera House after 1945

Events in the history of opera at Covent Garden after 1945 are covered in the article on the Royal Opera.

Ballet at the Royal Opera House After 1945

Events in the history of ballet at Covent Garden after 1945 are covered in the article on the Royal Ballet.

Management, Funding & Politics

After a revealing TV fly-on-the-wall documentary, The House, that coincided with the run-up to the rebuilding (and closure) of the Opera House during Jeremy Isaacs' tenure as general director, it was evident that much effort was required to revitalize the finances and prospects of the Opera House. Isaacs resigned a year early, protesting about a lack of subsidy although he had helped to raise much of the funding needed for the major refurbishment that took place. This eventually cost £216m including £78.5m lottery money but a temporary opera house to operate during the period of closure never happened and the pre-closure box office receipts proved disappointing.

Genista McIntosh, his successor, found the job too stressful and also resigned in 1997, causing quite a challenge for the new Labour Culture Secretary, Chris Smith. Following a meeting with Lord Chadlington, the chairman, Smith agreed that Mary Allen, then Secretary General of the Arts Council, should take over. She did so briefly, but her appointment was controversial (and broke the Arts Council's own guidelines) and she also resigned in 1998, after a critical Select Committee report into the mismanagement of funds over the previous years. This triggered a complete clear-out of the board, including Lord Chadlington.

Allen, who as Secretary General of the Arts Council of England had a leading role in authorising the Opera House's regular funding agreement and approving the National Lottery grant, has written a book, A House Divided, recording her perspectives on the events and personalities involved.

Lord Chadlington was succeeded as chairman by Sir Colin Southgate who, with a new chief executive, managed to bring the house back from a financial brink and to see the refurbished house opened. Teething troubles in the new house began to be resolved under the directorship of American Michael Kaiser, who has since moved on to direct the Kennedy Center in Washington DC (and who, revealingly, made clear that he was not interested in taking over the same post at the Met in New York when it became vacant in 2006).

However, the Floral Hall's conversion to use as a magnificent dining and drinking space pre-theatre and during intervals, combined with the construction of additional (more affordable) seating at the back of the old amphitheatre, has helped to attract new and younger audiences and added pizazz to what had come to be seen as an all-too-venerable institution.

And after years of disruption and personality conflicts, the arrival of an exciting new music director, Antonio Pappano, young and British notwithstanding his Italian roots, preceded by a new chief executive in May 2001, Tony Hall (formerly of the BBC) has widened the attractions of the company's productions and pulled in new talent that keeps the house full almost all the time. However, full houses are not enough to pay for the opera house.

Funding remains an issue in a country which is only gradually learning how to attract the private sponsorship for opera that its elite image makes essential, despite the huge allocation of public funds (£25m per year as of 2006) to its support. The re-involvement of key fund-raisers such as Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover and Dame Vivien Duffield has proved central to this endeavour. The failure of Alberto Vilar to pay money he pledged to the Royal Opera House has, however, resulted in removal of his name from the young artists' programme and the Floral Hall, which had been named after him.

The management has been innovative in a variety of ways: the provision of large-screen relays of live performances not only to the public in the Covent Garden Market area, but also to other parts of the country, seems to have proved a success.

Trivia

* The opera house was used for shots in the movie The Fifth Element.
* From the 1950s, it was common for long queues to form for opera tickets. The management eventually instituted a "queue ticket" system whereby, for each of the season's 8-week (or so) periods, patrons could queue up until 8am on the morning at which tickets would go on sale after 10am. These queues often formed days in advance of the box office opening. The "queue ticket" which was issued was timed for a specific hour of the day. During that time-period patrons could return to actually buy their performance tickets.

External links

* Royal Opera House
* The Royal Ballet
* The Royal Ballet School
*Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport's 1998 Report on funding and management issues at the Royal Opera House

Royal Opera House: Encyclopedia BETA

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