A Royal Opera House Once Divided Is Reborn

Once derided as an interminable soap opera, a kind of bad dream that wouldn’t quit, the Royal Opera House may yet turn out to be a story with a fairy tale ending.

As Queen Elizabeth II, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a host of other prominent guests turned out for a glittering inauguration of the revamped opera house at Covent Garden Wednesday night, “scandal,” “beleaguered” and other words normally attached to the home of the Royal Opera and Royal Ballet were nowhere heard.

Instead, Britain’s opera and arts aficionados were effusive about the house, renovated to the tune of $360 million, and hopeful about its future with finances finally in the black.

“It’s been a long road to get here, but I think the results are marvelous,” Culture Secretary Chris Smith enthused at the outset of several days of official openings.

Placido Domingo and French ballet star Sylvie Guillem will lead the list of guest artists accompanying the Royal Opera Chorus and Royal Ballet at a gala performance tonight. Bernard Haitink, who resigned as music director of the opera house’s orchestra at the peak of troubles last year but was convinced to return, will be conducting.

The celebrations mark the end of a three-year overhaul of the landmark, which was closed in July 1997 to undergo its transformation from a forbidding 19th century building with a snooty reputation into a welcoming 21st century arts center.

The redevelopment was plagued by delays, spiraling costs, resignations and threatened walkouts of everyone from artists to the electricians. Even last week, the opera house canceled the six performances of Ligeti’s opera “Le Grand Macabre” already in rehearsal and scheduled to open this month under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen and the direction of Peter Sellars.

Construction delays had left staff with too little time to learn the complicated new stage equipment, and extra weeks were needed to prepare for the season’s other productions.

“We have taken this decision with the greatest reluctance and after considering all possible alternatives,” Michael Kaiser, chief executive of the opera house, said at the time. It was necessary “to preserve the integrity of the other productions . . . and, above all, to ensure safety on stage.”

Among the other productions is Verdi’s “Falstaff,” starring Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel, the first event planned for the theater and set to open Monday. The Guardian and the Independent newspapers warned Thursday that technical hitches continue, and it is “touch and go” whether “Falstaff” will open on Monday in anything like the form it was first conceived, the Guardian reported.

That the complex has met its reopening target at all is seen as a success for Kaiser, a New Yorker and veteran administrator of American Ballet Theatre, who is credited with turning around finances and morale at the opera house since taking over in November 1998. The renovation has been fully paid for through annual government subsidies, a $125-million National Lottery grant, commercial sales and about $165 million in private donations, the latter being Kaiser’s specialty.

“There is no debt now. It’s all gone,” said Lisa Collin, an opera house guide and spokeswoman.

It is an amazing statement for an institution that was continually in the red and at risk of failing.

But while the economic turnaround has been widely hailed, the new-to-London practice of naming parts of the opera house after the most generous donors has not been embraced by all. For example, the renovated Floral Hall has become the Vilar Floral Hall after Cuban American philanthropist Alberto Vilar.

“I am certainly one of the more traditional-minded who worry about the ethics of private names on public places,” said Rodney Milnes, editor of Opera Magazine.

At the same time, Milnes was thrilled with the renovation, which he believes will bring a bigger and broader audience into the opera house complex, despite ticket prices that have not come down as much as the public had hoped. (They range from about $10 to about $240.)

Everything in the reconfigured opera house, which was originally built in 1858, is about access. The glass-roofed Floral Hall has been turned into a vast, public foyer. Though some critics say it smacks of a shopping mall, the hall is airy and inviting and will be the scene of free lunchtime concerts once a week.

Escalators rise to an enormous, curving Amphitheater Bar on the second floor. This replaces the Crush Bar, once home to a small, clubby opera elite, which has become the Crush Room, an open space that can be set up as a meeting room.

“The public will feel much more at ease,” Milnes said. “It is a much more public building.”

The main horseshoe-shaped amphitheater has been restored to its original Victorian style with wood floors, pleated lampshades and a hand-embroidered, velvet curtain. It seats 2,268 people--about a hundred more than before the renovation.

After the first gala, opera lover Rupert Christiensen wrote in the Daily Telegraph that when he entered the refurbished auditorium “my heart missed a beat. [The] restoration . . . is as dazzling as it is sensitive: Its red and gold can never have looked lovelier.”

So, he asks, was it worth the $360 million, “the blood, sweat and tears, the hirings and firings, the headlines . . . of the past few years? Emphatically, yes.”

Ultimately, the success of the opera house will depend on the performances and the success of the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera at drawing a crowd. After the season-opening “Falstaff,” the Royal Ballet will open with “A Celebration of International Choreography” on Wednesday and “The Nutcracker” beginning Dec. 17.