Martin Smith says English National Opera is proving that wider access doesn’t mean lower standards

This summer English National Opera took Glastonbury by storm, electrifying a crowd of around 50,000 with a performance of Act Three of Wagner’s The Valkyrie. Not your typical opera audience, you might have thought, but those hardened festivalgoers were blown away. And at the end they asked for more.

It was a brilliant success which, to my mind, sums up what ENO stands for: an unwavering commitment to excellence, matched by a determination to share that excellence with as wide a group of people as possible.

Today, policy makers might describe what ENO did at Glastonbury as a good example of “access” and “inclusiveness”. However, as far back as 1937, James Agate wrote of our founder Lilian Baylis, “[Hers] was and is the theatre of a people in the larger sense of the whole nation.” So for ENO, taking opera to new audiences is not a question of slavishly following the latest exercise in box ticking. It is what we exist to do and under our artistic director, Seán Doran, we are pursuing our task with renewed vigour for three very good reasons.

First, we must pay our way and bring even more people into the Coliseum on a regular basis. Second, we need to build the opera audiences of the future. And third, because we simply want more people to have the chance to experience great art.
How do we reach out? First, we make sure that opera at the London Coliseum is affordable. For every ENO weekday performance we have 500 tickets for sale at £10 and under - the price of going to a West End cinema.

Each season ENO offers the public a wide choice: popular repertory; epic works admirably suited to our wonderful ensemble and large stage; rarely performed operatic gems; and, in addition, ENO invests in opera as a living art form by commissioning and presenting new works. The great masterpieces will always be at the core of our repertory, but we cannot allow opera to become fixed in a time warp. Underlying and unifying all our work is a commitment to the highest standards of performance and a passion for putting on opera in ways that are stimulating, relevant and intelligible to today’s audiences, whether the production is classic or modern. And of course we perform in English.

We relish the unexpected. Wagner at Glastonbury was followed in July by our plan for a free performance of La bohème in Trafalgar Square to an audience of 5,000. It being a British summer, the heavens opened at the last moment and we had to adjourn across the road to the Coliseum, where we introduced thousands of newcomers to opera.

We seek opportunities for wider communication. Our collaboration with Channel 4 on the multi award-winning TV series Operatunity gave the participants, together with a total viewing audience of eight million, an unforgettable and inspirational experience of ENO’s consummate professionalism, and gained many converts and repeat visitors to opera at ENO.

Lilian Baylis held a deep conviction which ENO firmly upholds today. It is absolutely not the case that to reach out to new audiences, arts organisations have to compromise on quality. Indeed, the opposite is true. We will not draw in new audiences if we patronise them by “dumbing down” - indeed, all we risk doing is losing existing ones. To draw people in you have to show them excellence. Once they have experienced that, we know that they will return for more.

Therefore I completely reject the notion that there is a choice between quality and “elitism” on the one hand and “access” but lower standards on the other. That is an utterly false choice. The truth is that quality and gaining new audiences go hand-in-hand, but there are no short cuts to excellence - and it doesn’t come cheap.

Together with our season sponsors Sky and Artsworld, whose £3 million over three years supplements our core Arts Council grant, and a new partnership with O2 specifically aimed at audience development, we are determined that the kind of imaginative approach to reaching new audiences illustrated above is just a beginning. We will keep on reaching out to new audiences and we will keep aiming high.

Martin Smith is chairman of the English National Opera board

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