Making Opera Happen: the Perilous World of Keeping Britain’s Classical Music Alive

The coronavirus pandemic may have forced virtually all aspects of life to wilt, but there can be no doubt that it fostered a considerable boom in creativity as boredly philosophising souls turned to pen, paper, brush, and canvas. One of the most impressive projects that arose from the artistically fertile soils of lockdown is set to take to the skies in 2025 with two complete Ring Cycles brought into fruition by Regents Opera.

In 2020, British conductor and passionate Wagnerian Ben Woodward began to transcribe the Ring’s 16 hours of music into a new arrangement for just 21 instruments. Nearly three years later, the ‘greenish tint of the deep Rhine’ welled in Freemasons’ Hall as Woodward breathed life into the first of Das Rheingold’s opening 136 bars of E-flat in front of the few hundred onlookers that had assembled to witness whether or not this tiny opera company had bitten off more than they could chew.

Nothing in opera sells like a ticket to see the Ring, but nor does any work weigh so heavily on whichever brave firm has decided to welcome it to their stage. Whilst this first of Regents Opera’s Rheingolds was received with rapturous satisfaction by this nimble company’s largest ever audience, a mile or so west, the weight of the Ring’s four enormous orchestral scores crushed the English National Opera’s attempt to summit the peak of this art form, and Siegfried, Goetterdaemmerung along with any complete Rings which may have arisen thereafter were struck from the Coliseum’s programme.

Until the final relief motif of Goetterdaemmerung, until Wotan finally departs world and stage alike, the future of no Ring is secure. There was even talk this year that the 2025 Bayreuth Festival may only be able to muster 1 entire Ring: an unheard-of cataclysm at the very opera house that was designed specifically to give the work a worthy home. To stage an entire Ring, let along within the week-long window Wagner prescribed for any complete performance, you need stamina and liquidity in abundance – or a miracle.

Regents Opera are thus hoping to execute a miracle: two unabridged Rings, both to be completed within their respective 7-night prescriptions, with virtually no money and only hope that their fragile operation will be able to sustain itself with no major hiccups. If they fail, they will likely meet the same end as Wotan, who lacked the liquidity to pay for Valhalla and lacked the stamina to withstand his fearsome wife, Fricka.

As has become the shrewd custom of orchestras and opera houses outside of Bayreuth (and, in 2022, the Berliner Staatsoper) when embarking on a Ring, Regents Opera too has decided to present each constituent part of the Ring before bringing them together in a complete cycle. As of now, Regents is entering the home straight, having successfully presented imaginative and acclaimed productions of Das Rheingold, Die Walkuere, and Siegfried. Goetterdaemmerung, the Ring’s crowning glory will come with the first complete cycle in February and will determine whether this remarkable endeavour will enjoy the success of which Woodward and his dedicated crew of passionate musicians, artists, and linguistic buffs have dreamt and fleetingly tasted.

Regents Opera gives us that love classical music hope in a world where hours of traditional orchestration no longer seem to garner the fervent enthusiasm which it once used to for the truth it proves in the line ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’. At the turn of the century, Wagner was such a sexy cultural figure in Britain that Siegfried (now the least favoured of the Ring’s four constituent parts – unjustifiably I might add) was not only performed on repeat to satiate the enormous demand from Londoners, but once it had finished its run at the Royal Opera House its cast hopped over the road to Drury Lane to continue performing the piece beyond the ordinary schedule, such was the appetite for German opera at the time.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand why the Ring isn’t quite so a la mode nowadays; how could opera keep my fellow Gen-Zers entertained in this world of instant gratification? Whilst opera’s establishment may well be despairing, I am much more optimistic. The age is done when one attended the opera because of social expectation or because one’s parents forced it upon the disgruntled teenager. The modern youth of classical music is more diverse and dynamic than ever before; we go, not because we feel we must, but because we love it. Regents Opera proves that even with limited means, we lovers of music and opera will keep it alive – especially in Britain, which despite our relatively strong musical heritage has never been a hotbed of classical music to rival that which Germany, Italy, or Russia became. Without a fraction of the state funding in which Germany’s many, many opera houses, concert halls, professional orchestras and musical academies languish, the British classical music scene retains a vitality, even an exciting sense of jeopardy that shall, I am sure, sustain it well into the future.

So, join the Lobster, as we follow Regents Opera’s final push to the top of Opera’s Everest; I’ve even heard you can see Valhalla from up there!