Creating the future of opera?

It is here that I have come to love opera, and not just the obvious ones, either. I went back again and again to ENO’s brilliant production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha (which, in a break from their usual policy to perform works in English, is sung in Sanskrit). I adored the company’s 2005 premiere of a new opera based on the Fassbinder film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

Of course, it is far easier, in some ways, for the company to do new works (or at least unfamiliar ones — the Glass was not new), since there are no preconceptions about how they should be done; but this is a company, too, that constantly looks at the established repertoire afresh, too. Over the last few seasons, this has been accomplished partly by bringing outsiders’ eyes from beyond the world of opera to the company, whether theatre directors (Rupert Goold, Rufus Norris) or especially film ones (the late Anthony Minghella, Sally Potter, Mike Figgis, and currently Terry Gilliam, who a couple of weeks ago opened an electrifying new production here of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust.

It doesn’t always work, of course; and it could be argued that this is too big a stage for old dogs to be trying new tricks. And their attitude to reinventing the wheel of the opera is sometimes as vain as it is ill-informed. When film-maker Sally Potter finally decided to bestow her talents upon opera by directing a new production of Carmen for ENO in 2007, she wrote in The Guardian, “As I grappled with my own ambivalence about taking on an art form so steeped in tradition, so strangely lumbering and usually so expensive, and - above all - performed for so few, I asked myself how I could possibly hope to conquer and reinvent a form within the really tight restrictions opera seems to impose.”

She went on to say, “I used to think the best opera production of all time was the Marx brothers film, A Night at the Opera. When I was first asked by the boss of another major opera house what opera I would like to direct, I named it - not entirely in jest - as the one (I was of course met with disbelief). It’s a story in which all operatic vanities are punctured, most of the scenery is ripped or crashes on to the stage, and by the end ‘high art’ lies in shreds and tatters. Ironically, perhaps, looked at in another way, the film is itself an opera, played out by anarchists, danced and sung with love and irreverence, teasing out the big themes, freed from the constraints of crawling realism by its music, its big numbers and its jokes - the entire piece a comic tirade against inauthenticity. Which pretty much used to sum up my own feelings about what opera needed, having become - it seemed to me - a world of pointless epics played out for the rich. A big space for narrow minds. A dusty antique of a form. A dinosaur. And so on.”

With friends like that, who needs enemies? But then if Potter was grappling with her own rigid views of what she thought opera was, so do plenty of people, whether a public who dismiss it sight unseen (and its true, it can seem a rarefied club, especially at the Royal Opera House), or other arts practitioners. But the biggest enemy, perhaps, to innovation is the enemy within; and seeing the premiere of Christopher Alden’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at ENO last night, the curtain calls when the creative team took their bows reverberated to the sound of loud booing from certain sections of the audience.

I didn’t speak to them to find out just what they were objecting to; for myself, I was deeply moved by hearing this jaggedly beautiful score sung in an austere, stark setting of a boys public school, and I’ve never seen a stage catch fire, literally, as ferociously as it does at the end of the middle act here when the school is subject to an arson attack. ENO had a troubled night on the casting front — Iestyn Davies, playing Oberon, was struck with a viral infection and could not sing; his understudy was also unwell. So instead, Davies acted the role while William Towers was imported from Glyndbourne to sing the role from the stage right box. But far from detracting from the power of the evening, it only enhanced its sense of otherworldly strangeness, perfect for this dreamlike opera.

Earlier this week ENO announced its 2011/12 season, which will include 11 new productions, including the London premiere of Damon Albarn’s Doctor Dee that is being premiered as part of July’s Manchester International Festival and War Horse co-director Tom Morris joining ENO to stage John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. I can’t wait. ENO are truly one of our great national companies.