Welsh National Opera: a company, an orchestra and a chorus
Welsh National Opera
WHAT THIS IS
A company, an orchestra and a chorus
FOUNDED
1943; resident at the Wales Millennium Centre since 2004
IN THIS PROGRAMME
SOURCES
Public record only. The biographical facts are sourced; see About.
Welsh National Opera is the national opera company of Wales, founded in 1943, resident at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay since 2004, and one of the few opera companies in Britain that carries both its own orchestra and its own chorus on its own payroll.
It began as an amateur chorus singing with professional soloists and became a fully professional company over the following three decades. It performs in Wales and tours extensively in England, which makes it a national company in the Welsh sense and a touring company in the practical one.
1943, and the first performances after the war
The company was founded in 1943 by Idloes Owen, a Cardiff singing teacher, at a point in the war when starting an opera company was an act of some optimism. Its first performances were given in 1946 at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Cardiff, with Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, the double bill that has launched more small opera companies than any other because it needs two short operas' worth of preparation and one evening's worth of theatre.
The founding arrangement was the standard amateur one of its period: a chorus of local singers who rehearsed in the evenings and kept their jobs, professional principals engaged for the run, and an orchestra assembled for the occasion. What was not standard was the quality of the chorus. Wales had a very large population of trained amateur singers, and the company drew on it, with the result that reviewers noticed the chorus first. That reputation shaped everything afterwards: the chorus became the thing the company was known for, and it is still central to how it is programmed.
Becoming professional, and acquiring an orchestra
The change from a company of volunteers to a full professional organisation happened gradually across the 1960s and 1970s. Paid choristers replaced amateurs, a permanent administration was built, the season lengthened, and in 1970 the company formed its own orchestra, first called the Welsh Philharmonia and later simply the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera. Before that it had hired players for each production.
Owning an orchestra changed the company's economics and its artistic possibilities at once. A hired band plays what is in front of it. A permanent one rehearses the repertoire year after year, develops a way of playing Verdi and Janacek, and can be trusted with a long, exposed score. The music directors who followed, among them Richard Armstrong, Sir Charles Mackerras, Carlo Rizzi and Tomas Hanus, each worked with an instrument they had helped to shape.
A company, an orchestra and a chorus: three different things
The three words are used loosely in ordinary speech and mean quite different things inside an opera house. An opera needs all three simultaneously, in the same building, on the same night, which is why opera costs what it costs.
| Element | What it is | What it does on the night |
|---|---|---|
| The company | The whole organisation: management, music staff, technical and production departments, wardrobe, wigs, stage crew, marketing, and the soloists engaged for each production | Mounts the production. Everything the audience sees that is not a singer or a player is the work of the company |
| The orchestra | A body of professional instrumentalists on contract, playing in the pit below the stage front | Plays the score, accompanies the singers, and carries the overtures and interludes alone |
| The chorus | A body of professional singers on contract, trained by a chorus master, singing as a group and acting on stage | Sings the crowd, the soldiers, the villagers, the priests; in several operas the chorus is effectively the leading character |
| The soloists | Principal singers engaged per production, not permanent staff | Sing the named roles |
| The music staff | Repetiteurs, the chorus master, language coaches, the conductor | Teach the music, run the piano rehearsals, and hold the performance together |
The reason an opera company needs all three, rather than hiring them, comes down to rehearsal time. An opera is staged over six to eight weeks: music calls with piano, then production rehearsals on a set, then the orchestra joins at the sitzprobe, then the technical and dress rehearsals. A chorus that must act, move in costume, and sing from memory in Italian, Czech or Russian cannot be assembled for the final week. It has to be a standing body that already knows how the company works.
The Wales Millennium Centre, and the touring
Welsh National Opera has been resident at the Wales Millennium Centre since the building opened in Cardiff Bay in November 2004. It performs in the Donald Gordon Theatre, which seats 1,897 and was designed with an orchestra pit and the stage depth an opera house needs, and it has rehearsal and workshop space in the building. Before 2004 the company was based at the New Theatre in central Cardiff, a Victorian house without adequate backstage capacity for opera on this scale.
The touring is the other half of the operation and always has been. The company plays regular weeks at the Birmingham Hippodrome, the Bristol Hippodrome, Venue Cymru in Llandudno, the Wales Millennium Centre and other English theatres, moving sets, orchestra and chorus between them. Touring opera is a logistical exercise of a kind the resident houses never face: the sets must fit stages of different depths, the pit must accommodate the orchestra in each theatre, and the company travels with the production.
What the company adds to Welsh musical life
Beyond the main stage the company runs youth and community work, including a youth opera and a youth orchestra, and it commissions new work. Alun Hoddinott's The Beach of Falesá, staged in 1974, was the first full-length opera the company commissioned from a Welsh composer. Those two activities, training and commissioning, are what distinguish a national company from a promoter that merely hosts touring productions.
The plain description is the useful one. Welsh National Opera is a permanent body of several hundred people, of whom perhaps a third appear on stage or in the pit, that exists to put a small number of operas in front of audiences in two countries each year. It was started in wartime by a singing teacher with a chorus of amateurs, and the chorus is still the part of it that people remember after the curtain.
Also in this programme
- Welsh classical musicThe composers, the choirs and the institutions
- Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau: Land of My FathersThe anthem, its author and its music
- The eisteddfodWhat an eisteddfod is, and how the music competition works
- St David's HallThe national concert hall of Wales