Not So Bad for England

Not So Bad for England "If you can't sing at Covent Garden," rumbled a British opera star, "you damn well can't sing anywhere." The stage floor of London's Royal Opera House sags and some of its scenery dates back to 1908, but the theater's acoustics are still near perfect. This week, slightly faded but resonant, Covent Garden celebrates its 100th birthday in a gala performance for the Queen. The generous birthday package includes extracts from The Bohemian Girl, The Trojans, Peter Grimes, Aida, I Puritani (Maria Callas singing), plus the Royal Ballet's Birthday Offering.

For Britons, Covent Garden shimmers with memories of empire and artistry in opera's most florid era, when Victoria's passion for singers helped make London the goal of every topflight musician. Its history goes back even farther, to two Covent Gardens before it. In 1732 Actor John Rich, who had rented the site, a convent-garden, built a prose theater (its star playwrights: Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan). After a devastating fire, the theater was rebuilt in 1809, later named the Royal Italian Opera House. It featured not only opera but all-night masked balls whose patrons, wrote a shocked reporter, "were truly the disciples of the lewd fiend Belial." One gay dawn in 1856, the place burned down again, scattering and sobering the disciples.

Battle of Monocles. In the third Covent Garden, designed 100 years ago by Architect Edward Barry, the fires have been artistic or temperamental, set by such prima donnas as Giulia Grisi, Nellie Melba, Emma Albani. In the '90s, Adelina Patti, who imperiously ignored rehearsals, once filled the stage with detectives disguised as supers to guard her diamonds. Famed Manager Augustus Harris made Covent Garden London's choicest nightspot for rich and royal patrons who came to monocle each other--and protested violently when he doused the house lights during performances.

Audiences as well as performers were finally called to order by the batons of great conductors--Sir Thomas Beecham, Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner. Sir Thomas, who began conducting at Covent Garden in 1910, often whirled on the audience to snap: "Shut up!" Once, in a glow of satisfaction, he turned and said: "Not so bad for England, eh?"

Go to La Scala. Having survived its roles as a furniture warehouse in World War I and a dance hall in World War II, Covent Garden is blooming as radiantly as the famed flower market at its doorstep. The home of the Royal Ballet (formerly Sadler's Wells), it gives Londoners an almost year-round season of first-rate ballet and fine opera, although, in the opera department, Covent Garden is not in the same league as the Big Three (the Metropolitan, La Scala and the Vienna Staatsoper). But it has the daring to experiment with difficult new productions, e.g., its mounting last year of Berlioz' mammoth The Trojans, which no other opera house had attempted in a single evening since Berlioz' death. Glowed the London Observer over a birthday-season offering of Verdi's Don Carlos: "Go to La Scala by all means, but do not expect anything better than this."

*Britons have fondly stuck to the early English spelling of the word: "covent."

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