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The morning I meet Oliver Mears, the director of opera at Covent Garden, I’m still walking on air. The day before I’d seen Wagner’s epic Siegfried, the third part of the Ring cycle. Nearly six hours long, it is an immersion into a world of gods and giants, heroes and warrior women – but also profound and poignant human relationships. With the remarkable Andreas Schager in the title role among a superb ensemble cast, it is the Royal Opera at its best. On the way to his office, Mears walks through the backstage labyrinth. Singers are warming up; wardrobe people are discussing a costume’s last-minute fix; and a couple of mice scurrying across the canteen lend a bohemian atmosphere. Heaven (give or take the rodents).
Mears tells me about next season: course after course of operatic banquet. There will be a new Parsifal, conducted by music director Jakub Hrůša and directed, in his house debut, by the “brilliantly charismatic and interesting” Kazakhstan-born Evgeny Titov. There’s a new Un Ballo in Maschera by Verdi, with another director fresh to the house, the “stylish and rigorous” German Philipp Stölzl. There’s a return for Richard Jones’s brilliant production of Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová with Hrůša conducting – whose interpretation of Janáček’s Jenůfa last season was one of the musical experiences of my life.
After the popular success of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen last year – an adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg’s film about a family party at which a legacy of child abuse is horrifyingly revealed – there will be no main-stage operatic premiere next season. Mears says that in an ideal world of limitless money, he would like them to do a couple per season, but it’s a huge financial commitment, and with money tight, each big new piece, whether Festen or Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence, which premiered in 2023, needs to be a “bullseye”.
It is a reminder of how affected the national opera scene has been by a series of aggressive Arts Council England cuts. Glyndebourne and Welsh National Opera are touring less; English National Opera has been semi-removed from London to Greater Manchester. “I’ve always said that we thrive when we have a friend down the road which is in good shape,” says Mears. I wonder whether in light of all this, the Royal Opera sees more urgently its role in providing a pipeline for emerging opera composers. Recent successes in smaller-scale works have included Philip Venables’ 4.48 Psychosis, which is being revived for the second time next season; and Oliver Leith’s Last Days, which premiered four years ago and returned to the Linbury in December.
But the programme that produced these two works – a collaboration with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama – has been paused, and across the board, opportunities are dwindling. “What I think is most important is that we create and generate work ourselves, and we’ve just committed to a very large investment in research and development here,” says Mears. What they are looking for, he says, is pieces that will have “audiences on the edge of their seats”. Too often, he says, “when you go and see a contemporary opera, you fall asleep because there isn’t enough contrast, there isn’t enough variety in the vocal writing. And they may have asked a friend or a poet to write a libretto, which doesn’t work.” (He won’t tell me what new works he has nodded off in, and though I see his point, poets and friends can make pretty good librettists, if you consider Myfanwy Piper’s The Turn of the Screw for Britten; or WH Auden’s The Rake’s Progress for Stravinsky.)
The Royal Opera, he says, has one main-stage commission with a UK composer on the go and is talking to another. As for those at an earlier stage, as there are “literally dozens of different composers”, he doesn’t want to name any names. I look forward to R&D turning into commissions.
Out in the world, beyond the doors of the Royal Opera House, there are wars and fractious politics, annihilation and violence (a world that Wagner depicted accurately, if you look past the magic and runes). Covent Garden is not immune to their effects. Last July, a performer unfurled a Palestinian flag during an opera curtain call. Immediately, a staff member emerged from the wings and tried forcibly to grapple it away. All was captured on video by multiple audience members. The moment hit the headlines.
The grabber was Mears. I wonder whether he regrets his reaction? “The curtain call is not a place for an impromptu personal political protest,” he says, “especially when someone could be seen to be speaking on behalf of the entire organisation. So I stand by my principles, but it was a messy and unfortunate situation.”
There might have been other ways to handle it – such as dropping the curtain, which is indeed the protocol that has now been put in place should such an incident recur. I certainly don’t envy Mears having to decide how to react in the moment. But 182 of his Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO) colleagues signed an open letter condemning his “visible anger” and praising the “moral clarity” of the performer, dancer Daniel Perry. Perry later said that Mears had told him he would never work at the Royal Opera again. “I’m not going to comment on a professional conversation that may or may not have happened,” says Mears.
I’m curious to understand the RBO’s stance on expressions of political solidarity. After Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine, blue-and-yellow flags were raised and the national anthem was played by the orchestra: support for Ukraine was unequivocal. Yet this season – and next, again, in Mears’s own production of La Gioconda – Russian soprano Anna Netrebko will be on stage. Netrebko has in the past received honours from Russian president Vladimir Putin; has had her name appear on lists of his supporters prior to elections in 2012 and 2018; and most notably, in 2014, she was photographed holding a flag of “Novorossiya” – an emblem used by Russian-backed separatists who illegally took over parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. (In an interview with Die Zeit, she said she hadn’t understood the significance of the flag, or known that her name had appeared on Putin’s supporters’ list in 2018.)
“Anna has made her opposition to the war plain on many different occasions,” says Mears. “She hasn’t been back to Russia, even in a personal capacity, let alone to perform there since the invasion.” A dual national who lives and pays her taxes in Austria, Netrebko has been welcomed since 2022 to the world’s major opera houses (though not at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and a concert last year in Romania was cancelled after an appeal by the embassy of Ukraine). But to issue statements condemning “the war” without blaming Putin, or calling out Russia’s war crimes, was seen as deeply inadequate by many in Ukraine and elsewhere, particularly against the backdrop of Russia’s longtime instrumentalisation of its culture as propaganda and soft power.
What informs the company’s approach to these difficult matters, I ask. Mears tells me that the management turned down requests to display the Israeli flag on the exterior of the building after 7 October 2023, and on another occasion, that of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “All of these are responses to horrific events. There’s no question about that, but you can see where this might lead. We haven’t always got it right, but we have striven to be as impartial as we can.”
We end by talking about the magnificently unfurling Ring cycle – a huge undertaking that was first discussed with conductor Antonio Pappano and director Barrie Kosky back in 2019. “The Ring cycle,” he says, “is one of the foundation stones of the entire repertoire, and it’s a sign of any opera house’s ambition and vitality” – a kind of testing ground for an opera company. “When people come into our theatre, I want them to feel those big emotions and to experience those huge stories of betrayal and despair and jealousy and elation,” he says. “When opera is done really well, it’s the most overwhelming experience that it’s possible to have.”
Full details of the RBO 2026-27 season are available here, general booking opens on 24 June
