Robin Ticciati interview: ‘Glyndebourne is a festival where the established and the fresh exist together’

Glyndebourne, the great Sussex opera house, celebrates its 80th anniversary this summer. Hurrah! There is a new music director, too, 31-year-old Robin Ticciati. Hurrah! And he opens the season next week with a new production of Der Rosenkavalier directed by Richard Jones. Hurrah! Summer has begun.

There are few finer plots of land to be on a summer evening in England than Glyndebourne, one of those rare places where the frame matches the picture. In a way Glyndebourne defines England, and summer, and the way the English take their pleasures. Certainly there is no place like it anywhere else. People at other festivals may love music just as much, and swank even more, but Glyndebourne, with or without black tie, is a world apart.

And few operas will be greeted with greater rapture than Strauss’s Viennese masquerade, which is one of the three most popular works in the repertoire alongside The Marriage of Figaro and La Bohème. Ignore the musical snobs who tell you that Rosenkavalier is second-rate Strauss. Whatever you think of Strauss the man, and he provides an inviting target, his best-loved opera is loved for one overwhelming reason: it is the work of a genius. Two men of genius, if one includes, as one must, the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. If you don’t have a jolly good blub at Rosenkavalier, check your pulse.

‘A complete masterpiece,’ Ticciati calls it. ‘Music, text, singing, everything. Of course it has the great numbers, the end of the first act, the presentation of the rose in the second act, and the 11 o’clock trio at the end. I have utter love for it, and am deeply moved by it. You sense the connection with Mozart but it is seriously funny, not just a bundle of clichés about gilt and old Vienna.