Covent Garden, the Untold Story: Dispatches from the English Culture War, 1945-2000 (review)

Covent Garden, the Untold Story: Dispatches from the English Culture War, 1945-2000. By Norman Lebrecht. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. [580 p. ISBN 1-55553-488-0. $37.50.] Bibliography, index.

In the late 1990s, the Royal Opera House, which was barely fifty years old as a performance institution, suffered a managerial and financial crisis which brought it under critical scrutiny, including investigation by a Parliamentary committee and attacks in the popular press. Auditors revealed massive debts and the company burned through three chief executives in as many years. In Covent Garden, The Untold Story: Dispatches from the English Culture War, 1945-2000, Norman Lebrecht attempts to explain what went wrong. Lebrecht's thesis is that the company's downfall stemmed from too cozy and unregulated a relationship with its governmental paymasters, an "oppressive intimacy that verged on perpetual corruption" (p. 47).

Lebrecht begins with an analysis of the legacy of John Maynard Keynes, founder of the opera house's postwar administration as well as of the Arts Council of Great Britain, through which the government funded Covent Garden. Keynes expected to serve as chairman of both organizations, but his death in 1947 left the powers of the executive offices at Covent Garden undefined and the ballet and opera companies in perpetual conflict. Although artistic standards improved fitfully, the house became a hugely wasteful personal fiefdom for its managers, who did nothing to repair its haphazard administrative structure, arcane and archaic internal culture, and lack of accountable authority. The overlap of personnel among the boards and management of the opera house and the arts council, the government, the political parties, and the press created a climate of privilege and fiscal irresponsibility. Successive Covent Garden administrations used their influence to keep the wheels turning and the government paying the mounting debts even as the company became "virtually unmanageable" (p. 427). Meanwhile, the opera house drifted ever further from mainstream English culture. It abandoned the commitment to top-quality performances in English by native performers in favor of an international reputation, and huge ticket price increases excluded potential audiences. Eventually, the contradictions between the public source of funding and the elite society which attended Covent Garden and ran it through backroom connections grew too great to contain. The company's resistance to change led to vicious infighting; Lebrecht's final chapters depict a bewildering tragicomic whirl of administrators and critics at each others' throats. The organization avoided bankruptcy, but had neither solved its core problems nor restored stability by the year 2000 where Lebrecht ends his story.

Throughout this history, as Lebrecht tellingly reveals, Covent Garden has relied on "the English way of making things work, through committees of the great, the good, the rich, and the sycophantically well- connected, looped around old-tie networks of public schools, Pall Mall clubs, and private sports and pastimes" (p. 42). Dozens of administrators of all ranks, board members, governmental liaisons, conductors, choreographers, and assorted staff members, not to mention prime ministers and ministers of culture or the arts, come on and off stage. Readers may have difficulty keeping track of this huge cast of characters, because, after introducing them, Lebrecht refers to them only by their last names with scarcely an identifying epithet. The volume would have benefited from a time line listing the significant events and tenures of the major players, as well as an alphabetical index giving brief summaries of their positions.

The narrative also concentrates on the company's beginnings and its near collapse, accelerating in the middle decades when high performance standards were attained. Readers may thus have to remind themselves that this was one of the world's leading opera houses, not a troubled second-rate one. Indeed, one wonders to what extent the irregularities that Lebrecht uncovers had a negative artistic effect. It is astounding that a major cultural institution could have strayed into such chaos, but the Royal...