How the Germans made Glyndebourne

This is hardly the time of year for picnics on the lawn, but I have nevertheless had a week dominated by Glyndebourne. First I went to London to see David Hare’s play The Moderate Soprano, about the creation of the Glyndebourne opera festival by John Christie in 1934; and then to a Glyndebourne production in Milton Keynes of Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

John Christie was an extraordinary man. A rich country landowner, who served bravely in the first world war, he returned home to his house in Sussex to pursue his interest in music. He purchased a colossal organ, perhaps the biggest in England outside a cathedral. He put on little opera performances in the organ room. And then, at the age of 48, having reputedly been celibate until then, he married a Canadian opera singer called Audrey Mildmay, the ‘moderate soprano’ of the play’s title.

With her, and for her, he built a small, 300-seat theatre as an annexe to the organ room and opened an opera festival with The Marriage of Figaro. It was an instant success, achieving a standard of performance superior to anything else in England at the time; and this was largely due to the fact that he put in charge two distinguished émigrés from Nazi Germany, the conductor Fritz Busch and the opera director Carl Ebert.

To them he added as general manager the Austrian émigré Rudolf Bing, who after the second world war helped Christie launch the Edinburgh Festival by bringing Glyndebourne opera to the city. Bing became a British citizen and was knighted for his service, but soon moved on — to Christie’s dismay — to run the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Hare in his play makes much of the fact that Glyndebourne, so widely regarded as a quintessentially English institution, was in fact the creation of Germanic immigrants.