Glyndebourne Festival is an annual opera festival held from May to August at a historic estate near Lewes, East Sussex, England. The Glyndebourne Festival Opera Company stages several productions each year in the Glyndebourne Festival Theatre.
Glyndebourne performs operas by composers from the 1700’s to the present, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart of Austria, Richard Strauss and Hans Werner Henze of Germany, Benjamin Britten and Oliver Knussen of the United Kingdom, George Gershwin of the United States, and Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev of Russia. The British composer Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Second Mrs. Kong had its world premiere at Glyndebourne in 1994.
The festival has attracted many talented singers and musicians, many of whom performed at Glyndebourne before they became internationally famous. Musicians who have been associated with the festival include the British singers James Bowman and Felicity Lott, the British conductor Simon Rattle, and the Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink.
A popular feature of Glyndebourne is the long supper intermission or interval during the opera, when members of the audience may tour the beautiful gardens of the estate or enjoy a picnic. Some members of the orchestra play croquet on the lawn in good weather.
John Christie, the wealthy owner of the Glyndebourne estate, founded the opera festival in 1934. Inspired by his wife, the opera singer Audrey Mildmay, he hoped to create a setting in which operas could receive ideal performances. The first work staged there was Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. The German theater director Carl Ebert was the festival’s first producer, the Austrian opera director Rudolf Bing was its manager, and the German conductor Fritz Busch was the first music director. Christie’s first theater could accommodate an audience of 300. He enlarged the theater three times between 1934 and 1977, eventually expanding it to hold 830 people. The original theater was torn down at the end of the 1992 season. Its successor, the present Glyndebourne Festival Theatre, opened in 1994 with an audience capacity of 1,200.
See also Bing, Sir Rudolf ; Opera .
