“This feeling of success or failure?” I love it: Can Andre De Ridder get Eno back on his feet? | English National Opera (ENO)

AEndre de Ridder is either brave or stupid. He has accepted the role of music director of the English National Opera – its principal conductor and keeper of its musical flame. He will officially take up the role in 2027. The position has been vacant for several agonizing years, due to a 2022 Arts Council England announcement that the company would lose all its funding unless it moved out of London. Amid a backlash that, in short, saw the company retain a foothold on the London runway, but with a partial move to Manchester, De Ridder’s predecessor, Martijn Brabbens, abruptly resigned in 2023, saying the company was heading towards a “managed decline”. Brabins’ predecessor, Mark Wigglesworth, also resigned abruptly in 2016, saying Eno was developing into “something I don’t recognize”. It’s starting to sound like the plot of an opera. Bluebeard’s Castle, perhaps. A murdered conductor is behind every door in the palace.

However: De Ridder’s enthusiasm is irrepressible. For some, it will be difficult to join a company whose full-time contracts for its world-class orchestra and chorus have been reduced to seven months a year; Of which the CEO has just resigned; Where morale (insiders tell me) is rock bottom. But the 54-year-old, who grew up in Berlin, sees only opportunities. From his point of view, the tremors are a thing of the past.

“I love this building in London and Manchester,” he told me at the Colosseum. “And I love the pioneering spirit, and being an opera company in a city that previously didn’t have a resident opera company.” We’re talking before rehearsals for his show, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony, a rarely performed morality tale about rapacious capitalism.

He feels a strong connection to Manchester: he studied at the Royal Northern College of Music for two years, and was later assistant to Mark Elder at Halle. The new setting presents “a great opportunity for an opera company and a great opportunity for opera in general” to develop a new audience in Greater Manchester, “who may not have preconceived ideas about what opera is”. Opera North Salford regularly visits (a fact apparently ignored by the Arts Council, having been set up in the 1970s as Eno’s company for the North). But he thinks the more the merrier. The scene “should get richer and richer.”

He knows his predecessors well – including Edward Gardner, who did the job brilliantly from 2007 to 2015. The two actually studied together in London, taking lessons from Brabbins, who was a guest teacher on their course. So was Elder, who was ENO’s music director in the 1980s and 1990s. De Ridder says of Gardner and Brabins: “I like them very much, I admire them very much as conductors, but at the moment, I’ve chosen not to talk to them because I wanted a clean start, no baggage. I just want to make up my mind about how things are going to go.”

He talks about ENO’s recently announced Manchester plans – including the UK premiere of Angel’s Bone by Chinese-American composer Du Yun, which will be shown at Aviva Studios in May. He says that with works like this, whose subject matter is modern slavery and human trafficking, there is an opportunity to expand the boundaries of the form. “Do-Yeon is a modern example of what Kurt Weill did 100 years ago, fusing punk and cabaret into contemporary classical music in a new way,” he says. He adds: “The world of opera can be a closed and closed place, or a famous museum. Manchester makes us rethink what opera means, and what it can be.”

Angel’s Bone’s orchestra will be the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. But ENO is certainly a company by definition: it consists of a choir and an orchestra, its backstage staff, and its people. If you were producing work in Manchester without the company, would it really be ENO at all? On the other hand, bringing London-made ENO products to Manchester is not only expensive, it is somewhat imperialistic. Isn’t there a fundamental problem with the dual center theory? “It’s not just a one-way street,” De Ridder says. Work created in Manchester may come to London, while “we try to find ways to deliver the work with our core teams in Manchester”. (One example is the semi-theatrical performance of ENO’s Così Fan Tutte at Bridgewater Hall later this month.)

De Ridder has, above all, a history with ENO. As a student in 1996, he saw performances such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s broad opera Die Soldaten at the Colosseum. (He would have liked to see Eno in the future performing similarly semi-contemporary landmark works that had never been performed in the UK before – for example, Musien’s opera Saint François d’Assis, or Kaija Saariahu’s Adriana Mater.) More importantly, 20 years ago, when he was in his early 30s, he conducted the premiere of Gerald Barry’s brilliant opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, based on the film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1972.

“Eno taught me, and Eno made me an artist on the operatic stage,” he says. “It was a lucky time and place. Richard Jones was directing, who is one of the greats, and Barbara Hannigan [Canadian soprano and now conductor] It was her operatic debut in the United Kingdom. There were “seven or eight intense weeks in the training room,” he recalls. “The teamwork, the vision, knowing that we were doing something so special, how everyone pulled together — that experience has spoiled me for life. And I’m telling you, it’s not the same everywhere. I expected it to be like that everywhere. It wasn’t, and it’s not. So when this job came along and we started talking, I thought, ‘I’ve got to put my hat in the ring.’

It’s not the same now, though, is it? I have exhausted the musicians and singers. He got three, not eight, weeks of rehearsal for Mahagony, and only three performances. But he still believed. “The essence of the orchestra is there. The choir is there. And the spirit of ‘Let’s do it’ is there.” Two days after we talked, he messaged me. “It was not my choice, and could not have been, to shorten the contracts with ENO’s core groups,” he explains. “I come in after this matter has been identified and resolved, and I can only imagine how difficult this must be. But my mission now is to maintain ENO’s excellence and goals for everyone.”

He speaks passionately about Will – whose characters, like Alabama Song, have long since taken on a life of their own thanks to, among others, the Doors and David Bowie. Mahagony emerges from the raucous music crucible of 1920s Berlin, which is also Schoenberg and Hindemith’s hometown. “Kurt Weill is often thought of as the guy who did the jazzy stuff and the sassy stuff. But in this piece, you can see that he grew up in the Schoenberg school and uses the old forms – the canons, the fugue, the chorale, and some of the typical tone-based framework that Hindemith ended up with. You see all those influences, but also ragtime, tango, and American blues. There are moments of pure Gershwin.” His father conducted the opera, along with other Brecht and Weill masterpieces, in West Berlin in the 1980s. He’s using his father’s score.

De Ridder is currently the musical director of the opera in the German city of Freiburg. Why would we trade comfortable financing and long training periods for the fragile situation that Eno suffers from in a country suffering from financial distress and where a far-right government may be formed after the next elections? He laughs. “I think we are much closer to forming an extreme right-wing government in Germany,” he says. “That’s not why I left Germany, but you just said ‘comfortable’, and that’s the word used. It’s comfortable, yes, maybe a bit comfortable.”

When we speak, he’s just been working at 3 Mills Studios in east London. “There were three ENO productions being rehearsed there at the same time, Così Fan Tutte, Mahagonny and A Brush of [Gilbert and Sullivan’s] HMS Pinafore – The noise in the building was incredible. “I felt alive and dead.”

He adds: “I love working in Germany. I love that every city has an opera house. But the people are relaxed.” He looks around the grandstand and says, “That make-or-break feeling I had when I first got here? I love it.”