Opera for Everybody: The Story of English National Opera
By Susie Gilbert
Faber £25, 703 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Opera companies are weird and wonderful things. At one level, they are a fixed entity, the sum of the creative manpower that exists within them at any one time. At another they are the sum of their history, evolving through different buildings, guises, repertoires and crises.

It’s a bad omen if, as one generation gives way to the next, an artistic organism stays the same. And yet, as 20th-century historian Susie Gilbert points out in her trawl through English National Opera’s (ENO) past, it is equally sad if the artistic values that inspired a company’s founders get so distorted or devalued that its “soul” is lost.

Fortunately, that has not happened at ENO – not yet. The miracle that is ENO today, as reflected in Gilbert’s admirably even-handed account, is that it exists at all, such have been the constant threats to its existence. Forget two world wars – they were nothing compared with the financial crises dogging ENO in peacetime. Since the 1950s there have been no fewer than six proposals to merge it with London’s other big opera company at Covent Garden, all successfully resisted by ENO’s workforce. There will no doubt be more.

What comes through most strongly in Opera for Everybody is that the West End company we know today bears little relation to its postwar incarnation at Sadler’s Wells in Islington, never mind its prewar antecedents at the old Victoria Theatre near Waterloo, where its formidably tenacious spiritus rector, Lilian Baylis, held sway.

Its purpose then was to awaken “ordinary” Londoners – those who, being too poor to go to Covent Garden, saw music halls and pubs as their only source of entertainment – to the more elevated joys of opera and drama.

Even after 1945, by which time the drama component had been offloaded, Sadler’s Wells remained the People’s Opera. Prices were affordable and everything was sung in the language of the audience – the equivalent of the Opéra-Comique in Paris, the Volksoper in Vienna or the Komische Oper in Berlin.

There was a palpable bond between a permanent company and a loyal public, nourished by the postwar boom in state funding, that culminated in the early 1970s ENO Ring at the Coliseum, conducted by Reginald Goodall and cast entirely within the ensemble.

For many older members of ENO’s audience today, those were golden years. The rot started in the 1980s, when a triumvirate of directors set out to provoke their audience, no matter what it cost the box-office. The Powerhouse era made a big artistic statement but proved near-fatal to ENO. Coinciding with, and reacting to, the Thatcher government’s contempt for the arts, it bequeathed a £2.3m deficit. The party was over, and the past 20 years have seen a tortuous climb to accountability.

There are many saints in this story – Baylis herself, of course, closely followed by ENO’s immediate postwar directors. There are demon-like figures, too, chief among them the 1980s Arts Council chairman (and erstwhile newspaper editor) William Rees-Mogg.

Martin Smith, the investment banker who chaired the board during the Coliseum’s redevelopment 10 years ago, falls into a category of his own. Smith’s way of dealing with people may have been disastrous, but the course he set – turning a congenitally loss-making company into one that looked adventurous without betting the budget – was in retrospect ENO’s last chance.

ENO today owes him something. It is a duller place than at any time within living memory. Its seat prices are enough to make Baylis turn in her grave. Its workforce has been decimated and its dependence on international co-productions has watered down its identity. But it has survived, and is even turning in a small profit. What price progress?

Andrew Clark is the FT’s music critic