Royal Opera House
Arts Council of England
In his new book, serialised over three days in ‘The Telegraph’, Norman Lebrecht lifts the lid on the Royal Opera House’s turbulent history. Here, using unprecedented access to key players and private documents, he reveals what happened after Jeremy Isaacs let television cameras into the House
The humiliation that forced Genista to resign
Backstage, the death of a genius
Three costly tenors
At the end of 1995, the Royal Opera House stood at a crossroads. The flagship of Britain’s performing arts needed to close for reconstruction but had nowhere to go and no money to pay rent. More seriously, Covent Garden had lost its role as a nursery for British art. Few of its singers, dancers, conductors and choreographers felt much attachment to the House, and the high cost of international stars had forced up seat prices, narrowing the audience base. Jeremy Isaacs, the general director, was struggling to raise popular support and restore a sense of purpose, but time was running out and disaster loomed.
JEREMY ISAACS professed a preference for British directors of postmodern tendencies. What really excited him was a clever-dick director who could deconstruct a classic and make it look contemporary. It was precisely for this reason that he had hired Nicholas Payne as his head of opera. Payne obliged by assigning Wagner’s Ring not to some clapped-out German spouting Marxist dialectics but to a British director who was making real waves.
Richard Jones was a respected professional who believed in the director’s right to take the fifth amendment, never explaining his methods or meanings. At Covent Garden he missed meetings and was so late in delivering Nigel Lowery’s designs that Bernard Haitink, the music director, turned fractious.
Introduced to the Jones concept by Payne, Haitink slumped into his seat as one outrage after another was paraded before his unbelieving eyes: grotesque Rhinemaidens in rubbery breasts, a stretch limousine, an aeroplane. “You can’t just ignore everything that Wagner asked for,” he moaned. Payne reported his dismay to Isaacs, who replied: “In the last resort, if you and I are persuaded that the thing is right…Bernard will go along with it.” As, indeed, he did, keeping his eyes well down.
Haitink was deemed the saving grace of the Jones-Lowery Ring by critics who split generationally over its merits. Michael Kennedy, in The Sunday Telegraph, wrote a protest note to Wagner in Valhalla. Rupert Christiansen, in The Daily Telegraph, found the production refreshingly anti-intellectual.
In the teacup of British arts, a minor tempest raged. It would have quickly blown over were it not for the fact that every doubt and blunder was captured by television cameras and relayed to living rooms across the nation and, soon after, across America.
Jeremy Isaacs believed, at the very core of his being, in the power of television to uplift minds and improve the world. He had no hesitation in allowing a BBC team the run of the Opera House, from board meetings to backstage dangers, with the aim of showing the extraordinary dedication practised and excellence achieved in the national lyric theatre. There was no other way of getting on television; the unions ruled out live relays and the BBC had all but given up covering the arts. To win the hearts of the nation, he aimed to appeal over the heads of broadsheet critics and tabloid saboteurs. “Get the readers of the Sun on your side,” urged Peter Gummer, the public-relations magnate and future ROH chairman. In his eagerness to set the cameras rolling, Isaacs waived editorial approval of the project and, according to a senior member of the production team, accepted in writing that a proportion of the material filmed might turn out to be derogatory of the ROH.
The House commanded audiences of four million, high for BBC2. It aroused gasps of sympathy for stagehands who risked life and limb in the cause of an art they barely glimpsed, and of admiration for the low-paid and unsung auxiliaries who laboured around the clock to put a show on stage. Given television’s predilection for the exotic and unnatural, it was a fair and balanced portrait. But the television eye invariably distorts, and what lodged in the public memory was not the company’s halo but its horrors.
The gruesome bits were the informalities. Nicholas Payne was heard complaining to Isaacs about “the f-cking rah-rahs” he had to smile at on opening nights Isaacs was seen, naked from the waist up, dressing in black tie and yellow socks for a gala. “Undignified” exclaimed Joseph Volpe, tough-minded manager of New York’s Met. “What was he doing, auditioning for a Tarzan movie?”
A French mezzo, Magali Damonte, hauled from cooking family dinner in Marseilles to stand in as Carmen at Covent Garden, was thrown on stage without rehearsal and left to find her own way around. The Carmen she replaced, Denyce Graves, was refused a dining table for her family because they had all been grabbed by the rah-rahs. Fiona Chadwick, a popular Royal Ballet principal, was seen dancing her last Juliet, moments after being told that, after 16 years with the company, she was surplus to requirements.
The House showed up many of the cracks that were appearing in the company as it approached the dreaded date of closure with little planned beyond. Although some scenes were more than two years old by the time they reached the screen, a fatal impression was conveyed of an enterprise adrift, holed below the water line but still dancing in the ballroom and dickering on deck. The perceptual damage was irreparable. “Fly on the wall that nearly brought the House down,” was one newspaper’s verdict.
From the first night of transmission, January 16, 1996, Isaacs’s position was undermined. He had announced the previous spring that he would retire in September 1997, when he turned 65, but The House and its attendant events put paid to any hopes of glory.
A month before the series was screened, relations with the Arts Council reached an all-time low. Isaacs demanded the right to “draw down” some of the Lottery money earmarked for redevelopment. The Council replied that they could not release the funds until the ROH fulfilled the 18 conditions of the grant, including a balanced budget and a confirmed programme for the closure period.
Isaacs, facing close budgetary scrutiny, slashed the payroll. He cut 100 jobs one week, 200 the next. Four days before Christmas 1995 he had a meeting with the Arts Council which was “so horrible that I have suppressed the memory, having only a dim recollection of abuse and recrimination, of men and women behaving badly.”
Eye-witnesses recall that Lord Gowrie opened with a statement so airy and obtuse that, after quarter of an hour, Angus Stirling (the ROH chairman) leaned across the table and said, in his gentlest voice, “Grey, it’s obvious that something is terribly wrong. Please tell us what it is.” Gowrie gave a sigh and handed over to Mary Allen, his secretary-general. Allen reported that the Council had decided that no Lottery handout could be given to Covent Garden until its budgets balanced and its closure was acceptably planned. Sir James Spooner (deputy ROH chairman) rose, so violently that his chair crashed to the ground. “I have to go,” he said, “but I can tell you this: if you want the whole thing back in your laps, we’ll give it to you. We’ll put it into liquidation.”
For the next two hours, an eye-witness said, one side ” hammered at the table saying ‘give us the cash’ and the other side said, ‘no, we will not’.” The meeting ended with an agreement to send in a team of independent accountants from KPMG. Isaacs was seen kicking the corridor wall, but progress had been made.
Once the audit had been conducted the only outstanding obstacle would be where the companies should perform during the exile years. The Arts Council favoured Sadler’s Wells in Islington, which was to be restored at great cost to the National Lottery. The theatres Isaacs wanted to book were both in the West End: the Lyceum and Drury Lane. The latter was occupied by the long-running Miss Saigon whose producer, Cameron Macintosh, refused to budge. The Lyceum’s owners demanded a crippling rental and, while waiting interminably for an ROH decision, did a deal with Andrew Lloyd Webber for a revival of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Isaacs, while driving to work, was struck by a vacant site beside Tower Bridge. He suggested building a temporary theatre which another organisation, perhaps Disney, could inherit when the Royal companies moved back home. Planning permission was granted by the local authority on December 18, 1995. Two weeks later, just before The House aired, the scheme was abandoned for want of a willing partner. Disney were not answering the phone and the architects told Isaacs that it was now too late to erect the tent in time for the company’s exile.
Visiting Isaacs in his office that week, I asked him for the fall-back plan. There was none. He seemed unfocused, his eyes straying to television monitors on the wall and his sentences drifting into thin air. He was still hoping that the temporary theatre could be built. He told the board on January 22, “There was just a chance that the Tower Bridge theatre project might again become a realistic option.” That faint hope was extinguished when the Environment Secretary John Gummer, Peter’s brother, called in the proposal for a public inquiry.
Eighteen months before closure, the ROH had nowhere to go. “The right decision would have been to delay closure, and therefore the redevelopment, until clear plans had been crystallised,” said the ROH finance director, Clive Timms. Postponement was unthinkable, said Isaacs.
In the midst of his travails – with the Arts Council withholding its Lottery cheque, the Tower Bridge tent collapsing and The House oozing weekly into the nation’s living rooms – Isaacs was snapped at seven one morning leaving the house of a senior colleague’s estranged wife. A Daily Mail reporter asked on the doorstep if he was having an affair with Anne Dunhill, whose marriage to Anthony Russell-Roberts, the general director of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, had broken up over his liaison with a Danish dancer. Isaacs said nothing. Dunhill, a tobacco heiress, told the Mail that he had been helping “with my Latin translation”.
She would later provide the paper with an amplified account and adapt her experiences as romantic fiction. “Jeremy knew I was going to write a novel about us,” she told the Mail. “It was my first time as an adultress and it was all quite exciting, rather like being a spy. I thought he had an open marriage. When he told me he didn’t, I was conscience-stricken, but I persuaded myself that if it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.”
Isaacs held his tongue. Interviewed four years later about his memoir of the opera house which made no mention of the affair, he issued a snarl of defiance at the press. It was, he said “a straight case of kiss and tell, which is a nastiness that obtrudes into British life to a degree which was unheard of 30 years ago. We all make mistakes, and that was a serious mistake on my part. I was stupid. I thought I was trying to help this woman over a bad patch. She obviously brought herself to believe it would last. But it was comparatively brief…It is completely behind me. Gillian [Widdicombe, his wife] – whom I love very much – has put up with me. So it’s over. Over. Finished. Gone. And yet a newspaper will leap and pay money to print it. It is dreadful.”
What Isaacs had failed to appreciate was that Sun and television exposure had made him a minor public figure, and hence a target for tabloid intrusion. Winning the Lottery and pulling on yellow socks for the camera had backfired in an ugly fashion, making public knowledge of a private lapse.
The board, which might have taken a dim view of sexual entanglements involving two senior managers, were too polite to mention it. All they now wanted was for Isaacs to go.
Genista McIntosh, his designated successor, was due to take up her post in January 1997. Isaacs was asked to leave as soon as she arrived, without so much as a day’s handover. He would be paid a full salary for not working the following nine months.
Isaacs did not like being evicted and would remain a board member until the House closed. His final half-year passed almost without incident, in a state of suspended animation. As the year ended, Chadlington noted that staff costs were half a million pounds over budget. A further quarter of a million had been lost in South America, where the promoter of a Royal Ballet tour had gone missing. Isaacs’s last financial statement showed a deficit of £3 million of which £2million could be clawed back in identified savings.
“I feel I gee’d the place up a bit and handed it over in reasonable nick to my successors,” he said in parting. “He could have worked wonders if he had kept his mind on the job,” observed a Government official.
There were to be no ROH farewells for Isaacs, at his own insistence. He would return for the ceremonial closure in July 1997, announcing then from the stage that “opera has a future here so long as two forces unite to defend it: the dedication of those on stage and behind who give it, and the passion of the audience – your passion to enjoy it.”
In an open letter to his successor, Isaacs urged her to attend rehearsals, make a fuss of singers and get to bed before three in the morning. Above all, he exhorted her to innovate. “Whatever the financial pressures that argue otherwise,” he wrote, “it is crucial that we do not let a great lyric theatre slide, as it all too easily can, into the unthinking habit of safe repertory and safe production style. Adventure, I know, will be one of your watchwords, too.”
Of the many qualities that Jeremy Isaacs had brought to Covent Garden, his dynamism had transformed the internal atmosphere and his modernist aspirations the production style. But the television know-how for which he was hired had rebounded against the institution in the most malevolent way. Television, under Jeremy Isaacs, turned the Royal Opera House into soap opera.
There was worse to come. The comic-opera era was about to unfold.
* © Norman Lebrecht 2000. From the book ‘Covent Garden’ to be published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd on September 18, 2000 at £25. Available at the special price of £21 from Telegraph Books direct, 24 Seward Street, London EC1V 3GB, or call 0870 1557222. Please quote ref NB1016 when ordering.
* On Monday: Were Fonteyn and Nureyev lovers?
