There is nowhere in May more beautiful than England with the hawthorn out, the clear light and a thousand shades of green. And there is nowhere more beautiful in England than Glyndebourne, the Sussex opera house between the Downs and the coast.
Every visit to the ancestral pile of the Christie family brings joy and we lucky folk who caught the new production of Parsifal were granted double rations. Wagner’s final music drama is a first for Glyndebourne and completes a triptych of the Master’s late work, following productions of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As Larkin wrote of Sidney Bechet: ‘Oh play that thing!’
Music-lovers have been coming to this blessed plot of land outside Lewes since 1934 when John Christie invited three refugees from Germany to establish a shrine to Mozart.
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