Pastoral Retreats: Country-House Opera in Twentieth-Century Britain
I wonder, when formulating his plans for the Bayreuth Festival, did Wagner ever foresee his enterprise being imitated in numerous miniature and commercially viable versions throughout the English countryside? If the revolutionary dramatist had visited the first Glyndebourne Festival in 1934, would he have been delighted with John Christie’s vision, or dismayed by the social add-ons? And 80 years on, would he have enjoyed watching his own Tannhäuser being stagedin the Cotswolds?
Of course, it would be wrong to assume that all Country-House Opera Festivals in the UK were established with Wagnerian ideals in mind. Yet these organisations do represent a form of ‘total artwork’ – albeit a peculiarly quaint, even sanitised one – in which the whole rigmarole of the afternoon or evening, the bucolic surroundings, and the sense of detachment from everyday life plays as important a role as the operatic performance itself.
This was one of the most valuable points raised by Suzanne Aspden (Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford) in a paper she delivered recently at the Faculty of Music in Oxford. Prof. Aspden, whose research interests normally cover seventeenth and eighteen-century opera, has for the past year or so been exploring the history and narratives of Country-House Opera in Britain. This is a brief summation of her findings, which suggested a number of reasons as to why these ‘Pastoral Retreats’ have proved so successful since the founding of the Glyndebourne Festival.
She began by identifying Country-House Opera as belonging to a larger fashion for immersive media. This style of mixing shadows with reality has accompanied opera since the very beginnings of the genre (an infamous example being the flock of sparrows that was released onto the stage during the first performances of Handel’s Rinaldo in London). In the case of Country-House Opera, the rural estate and the lush pastoral surroundings create a fantasy of distance and difference, which entices audiences into something which is disconnected from the quotidian both geographically and, as it would seem, temporally.
Attending Country-House Opera often gives the participant a sense that they are reliving a past age. Accompanying the publicity for the first Glyndebourne Festival the organisers released a mock-mediaeval map of the route from London to Glyndebourne, which highlighted the opera house as the spiritual end point of a Dark Age pilgrimage. This was a coy evocation for Glyndebourne, who were trying to detach their opera evenings as far away from modern-day life as possible. In later years, the press would often describe the Festival as one of the last places in England where Edwardian opulence was still palpable.
Many other Country-House Operas have followed the model of Glyndebourne in their reliance on the movement of audiences and their capital from urban to rural. Both Garsington Opera and Grange Park Opera bill themselves as being ‘only an hour from London’, suggesting that is it perfectly possible for audiences to travel there and back again in one evening. But opera has always been an art-form which belongs fundamentally to the city. The idea of mounting a full-scale production in the countryside is massively counterintuitive, yet, ironically, it County-House Opera’s main attraction. On a practical level, opera’s many constituent parts has traditionally led it to rely on the city’s logic of agglomeration. But the spaces and places involved in these rural ventures have been so valuable to their success that they have replaced the need for proximity to necessary services.
From the Sussex Downs to the Chilterns, and from Buxton to the Cotswolds, it is the unexpected locations of Country-House Opera that is one of the key reasons to their success. To many, the addition of spectacular views, fresh air, and the drama finding the place makes the worthwhile difference between seeing Mozart’s Don Giovanniat a Country-House Opera, rather than at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The theatre at Longborough Festival Opera is situated on the side of a ridge, overlooking the Evenlode Valley in Gloucestershire (although Brailes Hill in Warwickshire, and Kingham Hill in Oxfordshire can also be seen). Walk over the top of the ridge, and you will see a large swathe of countryside with such characteristic Cotswold villages as Condicote and the Guitings nestled in between intricate valley formations and copses. These surroundings give Longborough a stunning edge to its summer season, the views being arguably the most important actor in the Festival’s arsenal.
Added to this is the role of the domestic, and of individuals and families. Certainly for Glyndebourne, the house itself together with the Christie family are central parts of the company’s ethos, so much so that the set for Glyndebourne’s 2002 production of Britten’s Albert Herring was modelled on the famous Music Room, where the idea of performing opera at Glyndebourne started.
This entwining of the dramatic and the domestic gives Country-House Opera a special atmosphere which many of the familiar urban opera houses cannot attain. Audiences feel more like guests to a private house party, and therefore dining and picnicking becomes part of the evening’s entertainment.
But does opera have a place in all this? This question takes us once again back to Wagner, who rampaged so much against the excessive consumption he saw around operatic performances in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. While many Festivals plan their programmes with a pragmatic combination of adventurous choices and classics from the operatic repertoire, results show that productions by Country-House Operas are in no detriment because of their locations and social add-ons. So perhaps the question to ask is whether Country-House Opera will ever reach the summit of its capabilities? Given that these miniature paradises are built upon the peculiar oxymoron that oddity equals charm and popularity, it seems not.
George Parris
In response to a paper given by Prof. Suzanne Aspden (University of Oxford) on Tuesday 23rd February 2016.
