AFTER nearly four years at the helm of National Opera, Peter Coleman-Wright has stepped down as its artistic director, citing disappointment with government support.

In early 2020, he told “CityNews”: “These days everything is about money, not about vision” and now that fear seems to have come true.

“I wanted to bring Australia to Canberra and begin a great company! But covid, lack of support from ACT government made my vision untenable,” he said on Thursday.

Coleman-Wright, one of Australia’s leading baritones and a former star at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, Opéra Bastille, La Scala and the Met, began the job in late 2019 full of optimism about the new company, forged from its predecessor Canberra Opera and partly supported by a bequest of $500,000 from the late John Stuart Drabble, who had died in 2017.

Brimming with optimism as he auditioned young Canberra singers in early 2020, Coleman-Wright declared himself determined to tread the fine line between nurturing new artists and presenting operas that would genuinely put Canberra on the map, saying: “Let’s create a safe haven for Canberra’s young singers and young singers around Australia.” He even imagined an opera house in Canberra.

But by January, 2021 he was saying: “I’d come on to the Canberra opera scene at the end of 2019, full of optimism that I could create a company suitable for launching young opera artists in Canberra, but with covid, everything came crashing down and now we have to be really careful.”

But despite the devastating effects of the pandemic on his plans, Coleman-Wright was not idle.

He staged large-scale productions of Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” and Handel’s “Alcina,” featuring well-known operatic stars including ANU alumnae Catherine Carby and Eleanor Greenwood and divas Emma Matthews and Rachelle Durkin.

His very successful “Pocket Opera” series saw him personally adapt “The Marriage of Figaro”, “The Magic Flute” and Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte”, and this year, Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love”, to provide an opportunity for emerging opera singers to study and perform the popular opera repertoire.

And in 2022, he persuaded conductor Richard Bonynge to become patron of National Opera.

But his long-held dream of staging “La Rondine”, Puccini’s answer to “The Merry Widow”, was never realised and it is believed that he had become increasingly frustrated with the paucity of good venues to stage opera and with the company’s failure to achieve funding from the ACT government.

National Opera’s company manager, Stephanie McAlister, says the company is already planning for the future.