page_title: Welsh National Opera
section_title: Fully professional: 1970s
hierarchical_section_title: Welsh National Opera / Fully professional: 1970s
caption_attribution_description: English: Tito Gobbi at his hotel in London
context_page_description: Welsh National Opera is an opera company based in Cardiff, Wales; it gave its first performances in 1946. It began as a mainly amateur body and transformed into an all-professional ensemble by 1973. In its early days the company gave a single week's annual season in Cardiff, gradually extending its schedule to become an all-year-round operation, with its own salaried chorus and orchestra. It has been described by The New York Times as "one of the finest operatic ensembles in Europe".
  For most of its existence the company lacked a permanent base in Cardiff, but in 2004 it moved into the new Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay. The company tours nationally and internationally, giving more than 120 performances annually, with a repertoire of eight operas each year, to a combined audience of more than 150,000 people. Its most frequent venues other than Cardiff are Llandudno in Wales and Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Plymouth, and Southampton in England.
  Singers who have been associated with the company include Geraint Evans, Thomas Allen, Anne Evans, and Bryn Terfel.
context_section_description: In 1970 WNO stopped using the Bournemouth and other orchestras and established its own, known at first as the Welsh Philharmonia. Three years later the last amateur element of the company was removed when the chorus became fully professional. A further broadening of the repertoire took place in the 1970s: in 1971 WNO staged the first performances in Britain of Berg's Lulu, directed by Michael Geliot, who had succeeded Moody in 1969. In the view of Malcolm Boyd in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Geliot, "unpredictable and often controversial", largely shaped the company's style in the 1970s. In collaboration with the company's musical director James Lockhart, Geliot is credited by The Times with introducing new young singers and "directing a host of groundbreaking productions" before leaving in 1978. The critic Rodney Milnes wrote in 1975 about WNO's productions:
  I have never seen, well, hardly ever, a pretentious, silly or seriously misguided production, and neither have I seen a dull one. … The company's greatest virtue is that its work is dedicated above all to the service of composers and audiences, and not to some abstract notion of "prestige" nor to the vanity or ambition of individuals, and in this it is almost unique.
  In 1973 Geliot's WNO staging of Britten's Billy Budd with Allen in the title role was presented on a Swiss tour, and two years later it was given in Barcelona. The company returned to London with its participation in the Amoco Festival of Opera at the Dominion Theatre in 1979, presenting The Makropoulos Case, The Magic Flute, Ernani, Madame Butterfly, and Tristan and Isolde to capacity audiences. 
  The company's traditional preference for the Italian repertoire was partly redressed during the decade: productions include WNO's first staging of a Richard Strauss opera, Elektra, in 1978. A new Welsh work, Alun Hoddinott's The Beach of Falesá, was presented in 1974. In 1975, in co-production with Scottish Opera, WNO began a cycle of Janáček operas, directed by David Pountney. Beginning with Jenůfa, the cycle continued with The Makropoulos Case (1978), The Cunning Little Vixen (1980), Kátya Kabanová (1982) and From the House of the Dead (1982).
  Among the guest artists who appeared with the company in the 1970s were the baritone Tito Gobbi, as Falstaff (1972), the sopranos Elisabeth Söderström as Emilia in The Makropoulos Case (1978) and Anne Evans as Senta in The Flying Dutchman (1972), and the conductors James Levine (Aida, 1970) and Reginald Goodall (Tristan and Isolde, 1979).
  In the late 1970s WNO combined with the Cardiff-based Welsh Drama Company, becoming the Welsh National Opera and Drama Company. The work of the drama company came under continued criticism, the Welsh Arts Council cut its grant, and the partnership ended in 1979 with the formal closure of the Welsh Drama Company.
caption: Tito Gobbi, WNO's Falstaff in 1972
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