The story goes that two chorus members of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera were returning to the green but sodden meadows of Sussex, England, after a brief break in London. One said, "I'm so sick of all this rain." Replied the other: "Yes, but it is privileged rain."
That exchange about expresses the aura that surrounds Glyndebourne, one of the world's finest music festivals. The very drizzle is sacred. Young singers vie for a place in the chorus. Never mind that the time commitment is extravagant and the pay meager. To perform on this stage is to be recognized as an artist, not just another pair of vocal cords.
Opera fans, too, struggle to get to Glyndebourne, but tickets have always been virtually unobtainable. Much of the small house, 40 miles south of London, is presold to corporate and individual sponsors. For these wealthy people, an evening at Glyndebourne is a social rite, a rare chance to behave like a true English eccentric. Men dress conventionally in black tie. But the women present a fashion show rarely witnessed in the late 20th century: long gowns printed with cabbage roses and exotic shawls that must be relics of Britain's imperial past. For many in the Glyndebourne audience, the evening's high point is the single, 80-minute intermission, when the ladies stride onto the smallish lawn to seize and defend their favorite picnic spot and lay out a lobster and strawberry feast as cows gaze at them indifferently from the other side of the ha-ha.
But Glyndebourne is changing. Last week, amid fireworks and the blessing of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, the company opened a new theater that seats 1,200 -- the original seated 830 -- and that includes about 60 places to be sold at $15. The design is spare, even modest, making no attempt to impose itself on the landscape, and the acoustics are much better than those of the old house. At the opening, the company tried to keep gloating to a minimum. That must have been hard. The management had, after all, opened the only new opera house in England since the first Glyndebourne theater was built 60 years ago. They had done it within their budget of $50 million. Best of all, they had fulfilled their dream without taking a cent of public money.
But surely the most unusual aspect of this musical Shangri-La is the fact that it is set on private property. It was built in 1934 at the will of Sir John Christie, the scion of a rich, ancient family, who saw it as a showcase for the talents of his new wife, lyric soprano Audrey Mildmay. The current proprietor, John's son George, makes his home right next to what could be called the family store.