Long life: The curse of the black tie

I seem to have been steeped in opera lately. First there was Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne, then Peter Grimes on the beach at Aldeburgh, and now Wagner’s complete Ring cycle at Longborough in Gloucestershire, all within the space of three weeks. As I write, I haven’t quite seen the whole Ring cycle — there is still one more opera, Götterdämmerung, to come — but it is already plain that something astonishing has happened. Martin Graham, who has lived for most of his life in a Cotswold manor house with a tremendous view next to the little village of Longborough near Stow-on-the-Wold, decided 30 years ago with his wife Lizzie that they would like to create a theatre there and one day stage Wagner’s Ring in it.

It was an ambition of truly Wagnerian proportions, and one that seemed as doomed to disaster as the gods of Valhalla. Many people thought that the Grahams were mad to believe they could meet a challenge that even the greatest and wealthiest of the world’s opera houses find daunting. But armed with determination and unquenchable optimism, they converted a barn into a theatre, furnished it with 500 red seats that the Royal Opera House in London was discarding during refurbishment, dug a huge orchestra pit under the stage, gave the building a comic neoclassical pink façade with statues of Wagner, Verdi and Mozart on the roof, and embarked on a series of Wagner productions that have culminated after 15 years in the triumphant staging of the only complete Ring cycle in Britain in this Wagner’s bicentenary year. The performances have been not just adequate; they have been outstanding, thanks in large part to the glorious playing of the orchestra assembled specially for the Longborough Festival by its musical director and Wagner conductor, Anthony Negus.