Opera without opera houses? Sing it loud

The simultaneous closure of our two top venues is a great opportunity t o bring grand music to life

The year 1998 may be a watershed for opera and for opera audiences. Despite the recommendations of the Stevenson report, it seems that both the Royal Opera House and the Coliseum, home of the English National Opera, may be simultaneously closed fo r refurbishment, leaving audiences briefly bereft of recitative and aria.

At first hearing the news sounds grave. Jonathan Miller would have to trek mournfully back to La Scala or the Met to feel appreciated. Pavarotti would have to brave the park again. And there could be a serious social vacuum. A night at the opera has always had social cachet, opera houses in all their glamour having the power to confer allure on their audiences as well as their stars. A night at the opera, even more than at the concert hall or theatre, is still the smartest piece of corporate entertaining. Big sounds, big emotions, big buildings, big names - even big singers - confer added stature on the audience.

Everyone becomes enveloped in a fantasy of importance that doesn't happen in, say, fringe theatre. Maurice Saatchi and his wife were recently seen at the opera with the chairman of British Airways and his wife, a combination that hints at exciting possibilities of business intrigue and high finance. Would this be such a potent combination at the greyhound track? If social, political and financial wheels must be oiled, they will turn more smoothly to the sounds of Mozart and Verdi.

Somehow, though, I think the social audience will survive. They can always decamp to Glyndebourne. It is the potential loss of the music that concerns me more. For all the social hype, opera is still a unique source of thrilling music-making, an art which, when it works, produces a physical and emotional charge like no other. But closed opera houses do not mean an absence of opera: if the opportunity is seized, opera and its audience could be reinvigorated and reinvented. Hiatus does not mean silence, a s Dennis Marks of English National Opera is anxious to make clear. Instead, it means different opera - a vigorous expansion of opera in education, of proms and concert performances, of expanding outside London and building up new work.

Already Londoners can hear plenty of opera without an opera house. The last time I saw Jeremy Isaacs, after Sir Colin Davis's unforgettable performances of Berlioz's Les Troyens with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, he was not so much rejoicing at the Olympian class of the performance as mildly peeved that the concert hall might be stealing his audience. At the time I thought he was being unnecessarily curmudgeonly, but the closure of the opera houses could lead to an exciting flourish of opera singing elsewhere.

Anyone who heard The Trojans, Peter Grimes, or Idomeneo at the Barbican knows that opera isn't dependent on expensive sets and costumes for its emotional and musical impact. Away from the opera houses, the music comes centre stage without any distractions of production, and the effect can be awesome. A smidgin of imagination and improvisation can make up for thousands of pounds-worth of production values, as anyone who saw John Eliot Gardiner conducting Don Giovanni in the Queen Elizabeth Hall last summer knows. With superlative music-making and minimal sets and costumes, he still created an electrifying frisson by bringing the Commandatore in at the top of the auditorium and having him descend slowly through the audience as the chorus, in a huge ring round the stalls, dragged Don Giovanni forward to meet his fate.

But the greatest opportunities for opening opera up aren't even in the concert halls. Last week I visited Peterborough, where a team from Glyndebourne is creating its third community opera together with hundreds of local people. A year of preparation andworkshops has led to the townspeople creating their own story - centred on the building of the cathedral and the search for angels - and their own sounds and movements. These building materials have been cleverly shaped by the Glyndebourne team. Even inan early rehearsal I heard and saw something that had real complexity and power, and being made by ordinary people.

The unique catharsis of opera rests in the way it gives utmost voice to human emotions. This can be done through the person of a great singer or, as in Peterborough it can even be done by untrained people for themselves (aided by the experience of professionals). The education departments of the opera companies, which specialise in such work, do not get sufficient credit for their work. At the Royal Opera House, where they train teachers to help children create their own operas, they have discovered that children pick up the essentials very easily. The concept of leitmotif is no more mysterious to them than working a video. Future generations of sophisticated listeners - absolutely essential for the survival of the opera houses - are created by the happy expedient of being encouraged to do it for themselves.

It would be an act of imagination and faith in the future if, during the period of the double opera house closure, these departments were to be allotted more resources and sent out to give as many people as possible a direct taste of the expressive powers of opera. With millennium funding, we could even have a genuine national opera, one which we all sang rather than watched. Everyone is released by being given a voice, and everyone has a story to sing.

Some places and situations lend themselves more naturally than others to operatic expression. I have a fantasy that a team from ENO or Covent Garden could settle in the Palace of Westminster and draw out the true dramatic potential of the place. John Major (light tenor) and Tony Blair (light baritone) could duet across the dispatch boxes to a thundering bass chorus from the back benches, only to be silenced by the glorious contralto of the Speaker. As for that other palace, Buckingham, it is simply wait ing to be set to music. The Queen, after years of silently being good, could reveal herself to be a demented coloratura soprano, raging about the palace in a flurry of semiquavers, cursing her wayward children, while the Prince of Wales, like Handel's Xe rxes, wafts wistfully through the grounds, singing to his favourite tree.

Failing this kind of co-operation and the dramatic revelations that might follow, the possibilities of a time where opera was released from the opera house are still great. Far from being a period when opera audiences went into mourning, it could be the moment when they found their own voice.