GOODALL'S invitation to join the staff of the Covent Garden Opera – as assistant conductor to the musical director, Karl Rankl – had come in September 1946. His salary was to be ￡35 a week, double what he was getting at Sadler's Wells. His contract with the Sadler's Wells Opera still had eleven months to run, but the company agreed to release him “for anything as important as that, because … it may be a long time before you get the chance again.” Goodall moved to Covent Garden on 11 November, hopeful that at last he might be able to escape Verdi's clutches and concentrate instead on the German repertoire, and on the works of Wagner in particular. He was to be disappointed. During the first season there were no operas by Wagner and only one, Der Rosenkavalier, by Richard Strauss. Not unreasonably, Karl Rankl, an Austrian by birth though British by adoption, chose to conduct it himself.

Critics and audiences were delighted that Covent Garden was being used for opera again, but were generally disappointed by the Carmen that Rankl conducted on the opening night, 14 January 1947, with Queen Mary and members of the Labour government in the audience. “We all wish the new Covent Garden Trust success, “ wrote Philip Hope-Wallace in Time and Tide,” but that must not stop me from describing their first effort … as a dire penance for anyone who really loves this epitome of the Gallic spirit, this gem of the French lyric stage.” Like the rest of the repertory, Carmen was sung in English, a policy that was to be pursued until the end of the 1950s, though exceptions were soon to be made for Tristan and The Ring. It was agreed that foreign artists could be called in for certain roles – provided they sang them in English – but “politically” it was considered important that there should not be too many of them.

Carmen was followed sixteen days later by another French opera, Massenet's Manon. This time Goodall conducted. The theatre was freezing. The coke for the heating boilers had not been delivered, and the audience, long inured to shortages of all kinds, sat in their overcoats and hacked away bronchitically. Hope-Wallace thought Goodall “conducted with real feeling for tempi and nuance, with aff ection and delicacy,” a view shared by the Times critic, who wrote that “texture and tempo were right, details of the playing made their mark; the music had its proper sweetness without cloying.”