The Royal Covent Garden Opera House has been on the same site for 300 years.
The House seats 2,268.
The wig department has to look after over 20,000 real hair wigs used in the various productions.
Each ballet dancer will go through on average 15 pairs of bespoke ballet shoes per week and 50 pairs are always held in stock for each dancer.
The wardrobe department is responsible for the care and maintenance of over 1,500 costumes.
Covent Garden employs some of the country’s most talented craftsmen and women, including carpenters, set designers/painters, costume designers and seamstresses..
During the Great War the theatre became a furniture repository, and during the Second World War a Mecca Dance Hall.
Maria Callas, Brigit Nilsson, Schwarzkopf, Tito Gobbi, Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo are just few of the great singers to have performed on the Royal Opera House stage.
Of all art forms, opera is the one most associated with high-octane histrionics, emotional outbursts and lashings of egos — both on and off the stage.
Trying to organise all that emotional energy into providing top-quality performances is most certainly not for the faint-hearted. And Elaine Padmore, director of opera at London’s Royal Covent Garden Opera House is not that.
Since joining Covent Garden in 2000 she has proved herself a formidable operator, dealing on a daily basis with top flight artistes who are often extraordinarily ambitious and competitive.
Not surprisingly, Padmore lives and breathes opera. She is a talented pianist who wrote a definitive and highly regarded book on Wagner while still only in her twenties. She went on to become the first woman artistic director of Glyndebourne, spent seven years as artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera and was made a Knight of the Danish Dannebrog Order in 1994, and she holds an honorary Doctorate of Music from her old alma mata Birmingham University.
In Paphos on a well-earned winter break last month when I interviewed her, Yorkshire-born Padmore came across as co-operative, witty, highly focused and very much the owner of the necessary steel fist within an attractive velvet glove.
Padmore deals with the day-to-day running and budgetary control of operatic productions, which must be balanced by maintaining the highest level of artistic quality expected from Covent Garden.
Her job involves a great deal of travel to other great opera houses, where she tries to find productions Convent Garden can collaborate with.
“We are always on the look out for new operas, so if I see a production which I feel will work for Covent Garden, then I will negotiate for that company to come over and play during a season. These days, few, if any, opera houses can afford to mount brand new productions all the time. These companies will bring with them the costumes etc needed to stage the opera,” she said.
Covent Garden audiences expect about 150 performances per season of around 20 operas. “Currently, we are planning another 100 operas originating from both home and abroad,” she said.
Ensuring the availability of the super stars of opera – the likes of Angela Gheorghiu, Colin Davis, Domingo, or Roberto Alagna – takes scrupulous planning.
“That’s one of the bigger challenges, to get the right person for each production. These days we have to book performers sometimes four to six years in advance. The life of the opera house and the performers is mapped out for years ahead,” she said.
This begs the question of fees. These world class performers must be in the position of commanding huge fees. Doesn’t the pressure on them, to produce three hours of utterly faultless vocal gymnastics, make them behave like the stereotypical Diva if they don’t get what they ask for?
“There is a general rule of thumb regarding fees, and colleagues in other opera houses around the world tend to stay within this rule. So no, we don’t really get problems with the performers – with their managers perhaps – but we all know and accept each performer’s fee. It’s common knowledge to other artistic directors what’s going on.”
When Padmore joined Convent Garden it was at the tail end of a long-running financial crisis within the opera house. “We did have huge problems in the nineties. I joined in 2000 but the year prior to that the ROH unveiled the new extension and renovation, made possible by Michael Kaiser the executive director of the opera house. The press called him ‘the turn around King’ and he did just that, came into the job and effectively turned a negative situation into a positive. Now we have a great team on board who have worked tirelessly to restore the house to its pole position in world opera.”
The opera house’s financial woes coincided with growing criticism that opera was being run by a collection of profligate and disorganised members of an upper class artistic elite. It is an image that Padmore believes has been dispelled, at least in part, by greater accessibility.
“We have rid ourselves of some of the trappings of exclusivity. We don’t want people to feel overwhelmed by the place, so we now have guided tours of the house. There’s a souvenir shop, a restaurant, coffee shop,” she said. “It’s much more user friendly now. We actively encourage the public to come in and see what it’s all about, and hopefully, lessen that feeling of the place being in any way exclusive.”
Padmore is also passionate about the ROH Young Artists’ Programme in which young singers, conductors and those interested in stage direction get the opportunity to join the opera house for two years in order to refine their skills.
“This is our future talent bank,” explained Padmore. “We need to nurture new talent and give these young artistes the opportunity to work and learn. We are laying down our future in this way as they are offered a marvellous opportunity to embrace all the aspects of working within the highly professional world of the opera house.”
