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The wonder is that Sir John's original dollhouse theater survived so robustly. He was mostly his own architect. Sir George, 59, played it safer for the new building, hiring Michael and Patty Hopkins, who are also designing a major extension of the House of Commons. Sir George's demands were all but impossible to meet: make a bigger theater that loses little of the old one's intimacy, and be sure that the acoustics are rich and reverberant, like a concert hall's, but dry enough to allow every word to be distinct. Opera houses tend to have a thin resonance, partly because of the heavy use of carpeting and fabric, which trap sound instead of distributing it, and partly because singers like things that way. Judging by the opening performance of The Marriage of Figaro, Christie got his wish. The theater is handsome without being ostentatious. The interior is stark, but the warm pine walls save it from being dreary, impeccable modern. According to acoustician Derek Sugden, "Wood can be death unless it's stiff and thick. A softer grain will absorb low frequencies, which means there can be no richness in the sound." He and the Hopkinses decided to use pitch pine left around from Victorian warehouses. Waxed, it has a rosy glow. The modified horseshoe design solves the intimacy problem. Says soprano Alison Hagley, who plays Susanna in Figaro: "It's really more a circle than a horseshoe, and onstage I feel part of that circle. The audience is my friend and I am theirs."
Figaro was chosen to inaugurate the building because it was the opening opera in 1934. Then as now, the festival emphasizes Mozart and, in general, ensemble works. Glyndebourne has more arresting and ambitious productions in its warehouse. But if the Figaro sets were pedestrian, the cast lived up to the company's formidable reputation for ensemble excellence (though there were standouts, notably Hagley and Marie-Ange Todorovitch, as Cherubino). Poor Renee Fleming, as the Countess, was stuck with the staging's only coarse moments. Somehow director Stephen Medcalf thought to dramatize the lady's unhappiness by portraying her in a kind of sexual heat. While Susanna is singing "Dei vieni non tardar," Mozart's heavenly, healing, last-act aria, the Countess is writhing around a tree trunk.
For an intelligent, ambitious singer, Glyndebourne is a paradise. Promising beginners aim for the chorus in part because choristers are also the understudies. More established singers seek out Glyndebourne either to learn a role or to do spring cleaning on one they already know. But for an international star, going there is time consuming and economically disastrous. The commitment is to at least five weeks of rehearsals and about 14 performances, with a no-play-no-pay proviso and no stipend for rehearsal time. The top salary is $1,800 per performance; international stars earn as much as $12,000 a night. So Sussex gets them early or not at all: Pavarotti, Frederica von Stade and Kathleen Battle all passed through, but Domingo, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Cecilia Bartoli slipped the net.