One reason I left Manchester, exactly 20 years ago this month, was its lack of opera. Almost every week of the year, in season, Mancunians could choose between concerts by one of three professional orchestras. Despite training a huge proportion of Britain’s operatic talent, the city was the largest in Europe without an opera house functioning as such.

Yes, there was occasional opera in Manchester. For two weeks a year, Opera North visited. Once or twice in a season, if you were lucky enough to be able to extract a ticket from an insider, you could see a student opera production at the Royal Northern College of Music. That was it. A whole three or maybe four weeks of opera in a year, max. Any form of entertainment grows its following by volume; Manchester isn’t an opera city because it hasn’t had anywhere near enough opera.

I moved to London partly because I wanted to be able to decide to see an opera any week of the year, and then do so. On the rare occasions I entertained the thought of moving back to Manchester – the city of my maternal family, where I spent every Christmas until the age of 15 – it was the lack of regular opera from a resident company that, among other things, stopped me. I was not alone. A resident opera company creates an ecosystem of opportunities for other musicians and creatives – even for academics and journalists.

So am I rejoicing about the announcement from ENO that it will ‘move’ to Manchester? Yes and no. Manchester deserves a resident opera company and I have no doubt that, over time and with the right support (and with operatically-starved Liverpudlians nearby), it could build an audience to sustain one.

What Manchester doesn’t need is a reluctantly displaced opera company with most of its interests, its main-stage work and its biggest asset left behind in London. It’s a tough thing to hear for ENO staff, for whom I have the utmost respect, but the only way for the Manchester plan to work is for ENO to go all-in for Manchester in the hope that, in return, Manchester will go all-in for ENO. Any suspicion of a London company running a half-baked satellite operation in the city will go down like the proverbial mug of cold vomit. To the rest of us, it resembles a cockamamie plan cooked-up to placate Londoners and give ENO the illusion it will get to keep the Coliseum (long term, it almost certainly won’t).

The current blueprint – as far as it can be called that – compromises every asset ENO has or might potentially have. It also dilutes ENO’s key artistic strength, imagining Manchester as a playground of venues for peripatetic experimental work. Anyone who believes in opera as large-scale lyric theatre must conclude that a Manchester ENO needs, as its core operation, to present main-stage work in a large and acoustically suitable proscenium theatre – perhaps the Lowry, perhaps a transformed Opera House on Quay Street, perhaps somewhere else.

That also means a chorus, orchestra and workshops based there – the sort of scale of infrastructure that will grow roots, give the company serious institutional status and make it less easy to close down (not to mention creating the supply chains implicit in the ‘levelling-up’ agenda). It’s tough to think of London-based musicians having to lose their jobs or uproot their lives, families and the careers of their partners. But if this is the way it has to be – and that’s what the diktats from on high decree, whether or not we agree with them – ENO has to face reality, forget about London and take brave steps to adapt, reinvent and future-proof.

As for the Coliseum, that beloved and beautiful theatre that for so many of us is ENO’s spiritual home (but wasn’t, let’s remember, its birthplace), the writing has been on that particular wall for years. As painful as it will prove, this situation should be used to solve the Coliseum problem once and for all. For a reinvented northern ENO, the theatre will only prove an albatross, both administratively unworkable and strategically risky. ENO should steal a march on ACE, with plans to place the Coliseum under an independent, trust-like organisation, with no obligation to perform there but the ability to exercise some control at arm’s-length, using the property for legal and financial leverage. The public need have no sense of the connection.

Very little of this is what anybody wanted. In an ideal world, Manchester would have got an opera house without having to nick one of London’s (and believe me, Opera North would have been just fine). But what of the capital, now missing the second opera house even Stockholm has? A good interim solution would see our touring companies visit London, as they have done in recent memory. I saw some fantastic WNO productions at Covent Garden, and some fine performances from Glyndebourne and Opera North at Sadler’s Wells.

Longer term, I’d like to think, that in the spirit of Aurora Orchestra, Grimeborn, The Bridge Theatre, there’s enough creative energy in London to fill the gap left by ENO – and that, when times are good again, such an entity could grow, perhaps with support from a detoxified and grown-up Arts Council England, to stand alongside Covent Garden as a meaningful alternative opera company for London. It might not ever be ENO. But nor, really, is what resides at the Coliseum now. 

Follow Andrew Mellor on Twitter: @operalastnight

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Opera Now. Join our community of opera lovers – subscribe to Opera Now today