Norman Lebrecht: Covent Garden - The untold story

By WILLIAM DART

Norman Lebrecht is one of the more caustic scribes working in Britain's classical scene. Until this month, he had a column in the Daily Telegraph in which, Cassandra-like, he would frequently bewail the fate of classical music as it teetered nervously on the edge of the slippery slope.

And there's a lot for Lebrecht to worry about these days: a shrinking classical CD catalogue, the perilous finances of American orchestras and, in this new book, the ups and downs of that most revered of British institutions - the Royal Opera House.

The book's subtitle, Dispatches from the English Culture War 1945-2001, promises a wider field than Lebrecht delivers. But a battlefield it is. There's corruption along with nepotism, cronyism, philistinism and even lust in the rehearsal rooms - all played out by a cast of characters that could have populated an operatic Dallas or Dynasty.

Yet, go back to 1946 and the original intentions were noble. Covent Garden was launched in the best of nationalist spirits by Maynard Keynes. Decades later, it fell into the clutches of monetarist internationalism. It's a saga Lebrecht delights in relating.

There is a haunting image in the first page introducing us to Dame Ninette de Valois whose iron will had implanted an alien art in stubborn British soil. It was a struggle from the beginning, still apparent when Lebrecht celebrates an almost all-British cast for a 1970 production of Falstaff. (I felt much the same sense of pride when NBR NZ Opera mounted the Verdi opera last year with only one non-Kiwi.)

Racy would be an understatement for much of the writing here - we can learn that Dame Kiri sang at Prince Charles' wedding without knickers and Frederick Ashton was given to peeing in other cast members' dressing-room sinks - although Lebrecht does ferret out some gems from more kosher sources.

One of the real shockers is an admission by Arnold Goodman, the one-time chairman of the British Arts Council, that opera makes no serious contribution to the arts.

If, like me, you shuddered at Lebrecht's recent assassination of William Walton in the Telegraph, you might be less than taken with cheap descriptions of a languid Zeffirelli and irrelevant snideries about Brian Epstein's taste for rough trade - unnecessary tackiness when this untold story is a tale so well-told by the person who is eminently qualified for telling it.

Simon and Schuster

$37.95