Why we should say farewell to the ENO

It’s easy to forget what a mess of an art form opera once was. For its first 100 years it had no name, it had no fixed address, it didn’t really know who it was or what it was doing. You’d find it at schools, at weddings, at political functions. It was an artistic whore for hire. Embroiled in an epic tug-of-war as to which of the three art forms — word, music or dance — should be primary, it was also lithe and experimental. In fact, it was more like performance art than anything you’ll witness in a modern opera house.

Why this historical detour? To remind us not to despair over the possible demise of the English National Opera (which has lost two of the more capable members of its senior team in the past week and whose receipts have taken a nosedive). Opera is a durable beast. It doesn’t need opera houses. It doesn’t need opera companies. It doesn’t even need subsidies to survive. Some of its most heroic moments have been in the leanest years. Think of the flourishing of Purcell at the art form’s dawn or the arrival of Britten’s Peter Grimes a few weeks after the end of the second world war. At neither point did this country have a single fully functioning (let alone subsidised) opera house.

Besides, aren’t we supposed to love challenging establishment institutions in the arts? We should. All the great turning points in opera were ushered in by economically independent enterprises swooping in on the carcasses of sclerotic creative cartels. Without a visit from an entrepreneurial troupe of Italians to Paris in the 1750s, the comic revolution that swept aside a French state monopoly on what opera should look like (and paved the way for Gluck, Mozart and Rossini) might never have happened.