Can ENO win again?

It is also the only stable singing ensemble (ROH casts are international fly-by-nighters) and the only training company for up-andcoming British singers, conductors, designers and directors. Without ENO, the most populous part of the country would be at a loss for lyric art, at the mercy of commercial marauders.

Demographics, however, are not enough of a reason to sustain a failing enterprise. If ENO is to survive, it must use the next 18 months to rethink its entire role, to the point where it may have to change its nature - and even its name.

Any analysis must start with what ENO does best: British opera for British audiences. The company is unsurpassed in Britten, inventive in Gilbert and Sullivan and unwavering in its faith in new composers, a faith richly rewarded by Mark Anthony Turnage with The Silver Tassie. There is nothing so organic in art as the sight of a national ensemble grappling with major national issues before an audience attuned to the faintest nuance.

Some of ENO's short-lived directors have sought to recast it as a populist Volksoper in relation to Covent Garden's elitist Staatsoper, producing native operas, musicals and operettas and experimental stagings of staple repertoire. That might work in subsidy-rich Vienna, but London's cultural economy is too diverse for ENO to predicate its future on Continental solutions. It must be free to pick its own rep, and especially to play epic works such as Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Shostakovich) and War and Peace (Prokofiev), which show off the giant Coliseum to best advantage.

As a training ensemble, it was always absurd for ENO to confine itself to singing in English. Any youngster with half a future has to relearn roles in the original before standing a chance of conquering the world stage. Many have consequently bypassed the Coliseum. None of our current stars - Terfel, Bostridge, Eaglen, Roocroft - was raised there.

To attract and develop new talent, ENO may have to break its iron rule of singing in English - not necessarily in all operas, but in enough of them to appeal to the cream of the next generation.

Abolishing the linguistic barrier will, in turn, attract a wider audience across London's polyglot and multi-cultural communities. It will also justify surtitles - not a £200,000 proscenium screen that few can read, one hopes, but a proper, £2.5 million seat-back system with four options, including Japanese and Gujarati. In a society like ours, it's the logical way ahead.

The company needs to recut its cloth in order to afford the new productions that will bring back a paying audience. Many question the need for a salaried orchestra of 80, when London is milling with underemployed musicians. A band of 45, Mozart-strength, should suffice, with more to be hired as casuals.

These are just a few of the nettles that are growing around the board table at the Coliseum. They will have to be grasped firmly if the company is to be revived. The Arts Council has promised a £16 million subsidy contingent on reform, a veiled threat that does little to restore public confidence. The acting chief executive, Caroline Felton, will wield the axe, leaving a slimmed-down ENO to the next artistic director, for whom the search has just begun.

The board itself is feeling besieged, having drawn a hail of abuse from opera buffs over Payne's departure. It needs to stem a reddening balance sheet and raise £41 million for the builders by next September, a daunting task in straitened times.

But the ENO governors, unlike any other arts board in Britain, have put their money ahead of their mouths. They have already raised 90 per cent of the development money, and fully half of that was donated by members of the board. The chairman, Martin Smith, led the way with a seven-figure cheque on the day he took office, and others followed suit. These 17 men and women strongly believe in the need for an ENO, possibly a very different form of people's opera for a fasttransforming population.