Long life | 11 June 2015

It’s June, and the country-house summer opera festivals are now in full swing. Glyndebourne, which opened the season last month, has now been joined by its leading emulators — Garsington in Oxfordshire, The Grange in Hampshire and Longborough in Gloucestershire; and next month a newcomer, Winslow Hall Opera in Buckinghamshire, will be putting on La Traviata with much the same cast that shone last year in its greatly admired production of Lucia di Lammermoor. The gentry in dinner jackets and long dresses are already flouncing about on lawns throughout England.

It’s always seemed odd to me that people should wear evening dress for the opera in the countryside in the afternoon when they wear any old thing to attend opera in the evening in grand metropolitan opera houses, and even odder that this should be encouraged by opera festivals that say they want to attract more of the young and uninitiated.