THE THREE WORDS you won’t hear from Paul Daniel, music director of the perennially beleaguered English National Opera, are “crisis, what crisis?” He is too straight a guy to trot out that line. Ask the 44-year-old conductor what it is like for the company to stagger on, month after month, without a general director (Nicholas Payne resigned last July after a bust-up with ENO’s pushy millionaire chairman, Martin Smith) and he replies: “It’s an impossible situation.” Ask him about the company’s finances and he talks of a “serious sense of siege”, though he says the deficit is “just over £1 million”, and not the £3 million bandied about elsewhere.

You wonder how this gangly, boyish figure copes with the pressure. He came to ENO as music director in September 1997. Within three weeks (in a move unconnected with his arrival) Dennis Marks had quit as general director. Six weeks after that, Chris Smith (then Culture Secretary) announced that he wanted ENO to shack up with the Royal Opera at Covent Garden. Daniel found himself conducting not just an opera company, but a fight for survival. It was a baptism of fire, but he emerged with his reputation enhanced and his company intact.

Now history repeats itself. Again there is no general director. Again, ENO is in crisis. Again, Daniel must take time out from his real responsibility — preparing a new production of Berlioz’s epic, The Trojans, no less — to make morale-boosting speeches to despondent troops.

There are easier ways for a conductor to earn a crust, and a less dedicated one would have dumped the Colly years ago. But if Daniel feels wearied by the seemingly endless backstage machinations, not a trace of it is evident in his voice or face. On the contrary: he still exudes that mixture of passion, puppyish energy and quick intelligence which makes his conducting so exciting. Is he never tempted to think, though — after backing ENO loyally through six traumatic years — that it is time to put his personal goals first?

“My great personal goal,” he replies, “is to get this company sorted. In this period of enormous fragility — after Nick’s departure, and with you and others talking about the board and company being in dispute — I can offer stability. I see my role as keeping everyone’s head down, keeping everyone on track. That includes a hell of a lot of hours with the chairman as well as with the performers, because everyone wobbles in these situations. But I think it’s very mediocre to stand up on a soapbox and complain in public about this or that.”

Who can he mean? That soapbox is pretty crowded by now. Even before Payne’s departure the vultures were circling. ENO’s policy of singing in English was under fire from patrons who complained that the text was so poorly enunciated that the words were inaudible anyway. Some critics accused ENO of using too many young singers who weren’t ready for their roles (a charge Daniel denies vehemently). And, most damning of all, the company contrived to stage its lamest productions for years — not least the shockers produced by Calixto Bieito — just as Covent Garden underwent an artistic rebirth. The contrast was painful, and expensive for ENO. Attendances fell. Then Payne’s resignation (as good as forced when he lost the confidence of Chairman Smith) triggered some vitriolic attacks on the board by previous ENO stalwarts such as David Pountney, who described Smith as “an amateur and a bully”.

Now the company’s rank-and-file also seem to have turned against the board. Today a business plan devised by Payne’s acting replacement, a management consultant called Caroline Felton, will be discussed by the Arts Council. This rescue package, involving millions of pounds of extra subsidy, is designed to ease ENO through the difficult six months from June when it will be homeless, and then bring it back to the Coliseum in good shape when the 100-year-old theatre has had its £41 million facelift. But it was torpedoed last week before it left port. Equity got wind of 20 proposed redundancies in the chorus (with rumours of a similar orchestral cull to follow) and kicked up a truly operatic song and dance. There is much to be said for ENO moving towards using a smaller, flexible, Glyndebourne-style chorus of younger singers on short-term contracts. But now the atmosphere is pure poison, and a strike looms.

Daniel won’t talk about this dust-up; the company maintains that its business plan is confidential. But he has plenty to say about other problems. First he defends the ambitious (suicidal, some might maintain) programming of what turned out to be Payne’s final season.

“We are constantly besieged by marketeers who tell us we are supply-led when we should be demand-led,” the conductor says. “But if you only give people what they are comfortable with, you are on the road to extinction. I think some of our older audiences — the people who say they don’t want things to change — forget that, 20 years ago, they were the very people who flocked to see all the radical, risky things that the Coliseum put on in the Eighties.

The fact is that Bieito’s productions got standing ovations from students and younger people. Our job is to push at the edge of the comfort zone.”

But what if this endangers ENO’s financial stability, as seems to be the case? “Let’s put this into perspective,” Daniel says. “For the four years after I first arrived ENO traded 1.5 per cent either side of break-even. Then, for whatever reason — and I know everyone is tired of September 11 being blamed for everything — all the performing arts hit financial problems. Ask anyone in the West End. Ask them at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where they are $12 million down on what they need to fulfil their plans. The fact is that the climate has changed.”

So shouldn’t ENO’s plans have changed with it? To be blunt, shouldn’t the company have played safe? Daniel shakes his head vigorously. “A period like this — when people have got the willies about what the hell is going on in our society — is exactly the time for arts organisations to put on interesting, provocative shows! That’s what ENO is about. It is a very volatile opera company. It takes risks. It’s not very good at doing tradition, and I’m proud of that.”

I ask Daniel whether he thinks the ENO board and Chairman Smith share this vision. A Pinteresque pause follows. “Speaking out of turn,” Daniel says finally, “I think there should be a greater emphasis at board level on the art. Traditionally on boards you get bankers and lawyers and people who have money or who are good at finding it. You need to recruit different sorts of expertise to balance that.”