ONE MORNING HALF A lifetime ago I was sitting in a garret office at the London Coliseum listening to the Queen’s cousin tell me what the public really wanted. The Earl of Harewood — George, when you got to know him better — was managing director of English National Opera from 1972 to 1985.
Neither he, nor anyone else, saw any kind of conflict between the “people’s opera” being run by a king’s grandson, an Earl with a vast estate in Yorkshire. This was by no means the weirdest of a catalogue of anomalies and amateurisms that has
