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. At one stage, by contrast, English National Opera actually urged its audiences to turn up in jeans and trainers to make them feel at their ease. To be fair to the summer festivals, none of them requires that their visitors come dressed as penguins, but most of them generally choose to do so.
It is a tradition started in 1934 by John Christie when he founded the Glyndebourne opera out of love for his wife, the opera singer Audrey Mildmay. Christie believed it was incumbent on audiences to dress formally out of respect for the artists who had worked so hard on their behalf. Glyndebourne, while not insisting on it, still says on its website that ‘formal evening dress is customary’; and its successors, aspiring to the same sort of social cachet that Glyndebourne acquired, do not discourage it.
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