Giving opera a real rattle

The Arts:The appointment of Niall Doyle as chief executive of Opera Ireland was a surprise. But radical change is needed if opera is to take its rightful place among Irish arts, Doyle tells Michael Dervan.

The last few years have been a time of change and upheaval for opera management in Ireland. The most dramatic or, if you prefer, operatic scenario was acted out in the High Court by Wexford Festival Opera and its now departed chief executive, Michael Hunt. But the change at Opera Ireland, while consensual, has been at least as radical. When David Collopy quit to work as an independent consultant, there was no name being touted to be his most likely successor as the company's chief executive. The appointment of Niall Doyle came as quite a surprise.

Doyle had spent eight years at the helm of RTÉ's music division, steering its two orchestras and other performing groups through one of the most perilous periods in the station's history. His achievements run to rather more than survival and stabilisation during a time of swingeing cuts. There were successes along the way (the greatly improved programming of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the establishment of the RTÉ Living Music Festival), and failures too (the gamble with Laurent Wagner as principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and that orchestra's aborted residency at the Helix).

Doyle was not only tough in standing up for the cause of music within RTÉ, he fought difficult battles with the outside world too, in public conflicts with the National Concert Hall about hiring fees and with the Wexford Festival about the use of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.

His move to Opera Ireland confronts him with a huge change of scale and resources, and a completely different set of challenges. Incredible as it may seem, Opera Ireland, founded as the Dublin Grand Opera Society in 1941, now actually presents fewer annual performances than it did in the 1940s and indeed up to the late 1980s. The company has a dreadful record of lurching from one financial crisis to another. And the variability in its musical and production standards is not completely offset by the welcome broadening of repertoire that was introduced by the current artistic director, Dieter Kaegi. You could be forgiven for thinking that one of the attractions for Doyle in moving to Opera Ireland was that, in certain key ways, the only direction for the company could be up.

His own explanation is that he was first and foremost attracted by the prospect of working in opera, an art form he was slow to come to terms with but which he now finds "just the most incredible art form". Opera Ireland's 1999 production of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunovwas a key turning point for him, and the thrill of the experience clearly left him with a special affection for the company.

The job was "an unexpected opportunity," he says, pointing out that a lot of things in life are simply happenstance. "One goes to a particular job because it's there. You don't plan these things, because you can't. Then there was the organisational challenge, the creative opportunities there are as a manager, as somebody who's been working in organisations trying to do these artistic things, which is probably what I enjoy most. It represented an incredible creative opportunity as an organisation, given the things that are there to be done.

"I'd been in RTÉ for nearly eight and a half years, and that's longer than I'd ever been in one place doing one thing before, professionally. It just felt right to move on. It's a good thing to do something and to give it as much as you have. But there's a point after which no matter how much you continue to give it, you're going to feel that you're achieving less than you did in previous years. That's a good time to move on. There was a rightness in letting somebody else have a crack at RTÉ, and then having a crack myself at Opera Ireland."

IN TERMS OFopera provision, according to Doyle, Ireland "probably lies at the bottom of the European table. It's not even standing, it's so poorly provided for. We provide in this country very, very little home-grown opera production, extraordinarily little relative to our size.

"In that way, we are appallingly unique, and that's been the case for a very long time. The justifications for it, historically, were that opera always costs a lot of money. It's the most expensive art form to produce, bar film, but film can make money in a way that opera can't. And, as a country, we were always too poor to produce that level of opera provision. It was easier for us and cheaper for us to provide other things that were also needed.

"I think the point has long since come and gone where Ireland can plead poverty in relation to something like this. That really is what I meant when I said there is this tremendous creative opportunity. There is an absolutely gaping need and void to provide opera for the audience that is already here, a large audience that simply cannot get what it wants. We as a country are failing to provide the audience with what it wants and what it needs. There's a great opportunity, working in a company like Opera Ireland, to have a go at that problem, to give leadership around these major issues. So for me that's one of the great attractions of coming into the job, to help point Opera Ireland in that direction."

It's hard to disagree with him about the provision of opera. The east European states that are now in the European Union, even the tiny Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have national companies working full seasons in national opera houses. Opera Ireland manages just 18 performances a year in Dublin's Gaiety Theatre which, even with recent improvements, has a pit that can't actually accommodate the size of orchestra needed for much of the most popular opera repertoire.

"Ireland," says Doyle, "needs to have as much professionally produced opera of high quality as the population of this country wants and needs and can want and can need. That's a matter of providing for the citizenry, ultimately.

"It's a question of seeing that as a country we provide that critical mass of opera for the people of the country. And then, from that flow a whole series of other things - how do you do it, what kind of companies and how many companies do you need? How do go about doing your business, how do you organise it, and how do you fund and finance it?"

He's explicit about where the country's biggest failings are to be found. "There are gaps in provision in most areas of opera production in Ireland, there's no question about it," he says. "I wouldn't say that any aspect of opera production in Ireland is healthy and doing fine."

But one deficiency stands out for him above all others. He compares the situation of opera to the situation of national orchestras, theatres and museums. They tend to be in the centres of greatest population.

"They are sited in the capital city," he says. "And what is astonishing in Ireland is that there's very little opera in general, but the capital city, one could argue, has proportionately far, far less, than any other part of the country, almost."

THE FUTURE HEwould like to see involves both a national opera company and a national opera house.

"I think if you have a national opera company and you want to provide opera of high quality for the people of the country, you must do it in a proper venue that's designed for the purpose, and works for the purpose, and does a good job," he says. "I cannot envisage any way of meeting that provision without having a purpose-built building that functions very well for the art form. And we don't have that in Dublin. It's fantastic that Wexford are now getting one for their festival. That's really wonderful. That will enable them to present their product in the optimum way for the public. I'm delighted about that. It throws into even sharper relief the capital city of this country, with over a million people living within reach, doesn't have a similar facility to enable the optimum presentation of opera in Dublin."

The most immediate element of opera reform in Ireland, he says, "has to be some sort of national opera company, operating in and out of the capital city, closest to the largest number of people, because that's the most efficient way to do it. That has to be the case. Opera Ireland, it seems to me, has always been the best-positioned to be that, and to deliver that for the country, but hasn't managed to do it yet, for a whole series of reasons. What I'm interested in seeing is if I can do my bit to help bridge that gap. I don't know whether I'll see it through in my lifetime here. But I want to have a really good push at that.

"As a hurling friend of mine once said: 'We're going to have a real rattle at the All-Ireland this year.' I want to have a real rattle at this."

Opera Ireland's next season, of Mozart'sLe nozze di Figaro and Strauss'sAriadne auf Naxos , runs at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from Sat, Mar 29, to Sun, Apr 6. Public booking begins on Mon, Feb 18.