Angry Jonathan Miller says opera career is over

Sir Jonathan Miller, Britain's best-known opera director, has said his career in opera is effectively over. Now 70, he told the Guardian that opera houses had turned their back on him and he was "bitter and angry" about it.

Donizetti's Don Pasquale, which opens next week at the Royal Opera House, is likely to be his last new production in the UK, and even this was first seen three years ago in Florence.

Miller will direct Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito for the Zurich Opera in April, but he has no other new production planned. Operas are scheduled four or even five years ahead, so he said he accepted that his career was at an end. "I'm putting up with the fact that I can't do any more," he said. "England is obsessed with the cutting edge, the new thing, and if you're as old as I am, you're assumed to be dead - and actually made to be dead in the end.

"It's too late for people to ask me. If they asked me now, it would be three or four years ahead. I'll be 74 then and I won't want to be sitting in hotel rooms, getting on aeroplanes, getting visas and putting my finger on to immigration officers' testing boards."

Miller is especially hurt that English National Opera, where he directed many of his best-known productions - a comic Anglo-Japanese Mikado, a Franco-era Carmen, the mafia Rigoletto - no longer calls him. "I just don't get employed now," he said, "yet ENO survives on about three or four of my things which are 20 years old. They can't do without them."

Miller has always felt undervalued in the UK. He said that, even with Don Pasquale - which opens at Covent Garden on November 27 - he had to convince the Royal Opera House to take it. "I had to per suade them to come and look at it," he said. "I don't think they would have known about it otherwise. Ninety per cent of my work has not been seen in this country. I'm a reject here."

Miller, who for 40 years has had parallel careers in opera, theatre and television, said that his principal interest was now junk-metal sculpture. He held his first exhibition in London last year. "I like putting my bits of metal together," he said. "I haven't got to ask anyone; I haven't got to convince anyone that it's going to sell, and I haven't got to worry whether critics will think I've brought a suitable musical sensitivity to bear on it."