GLYNDEBOURNE FESTIVAL OPERA

Glyndebourne Festival Opera is a summer of opera, from late May to the end of August, in a theatre built onto a country house in the Sussex Downs, near Lewes. Much of the audience comes down from London on an afternoon train in black tie, and dines on the lawn halfway through the opera.

It has been done this way since 1934, and it was a marriage that started it.

The Organ Room

John Christie taught science at Eton, and in 1920 came into Glyndebourne, his family’s house in Sussex. He built onto it an organ room eighty feet long, and held musical evenings in it.

In 1931 he married a soprano, Audrey Mildmay, who had sung at one of them. When he set out to build a theatre, she told him that if he was going to spend all that money, he should do the thing properly.

He did. The first season opened on 28 May 1934 with Le nozze di Figaro, and she sang Susanna.

The conductor was Fritz Busch, dismissed from Dresden the year before after Nazi protesters broke up a performance he was conducting. The director was Carl Ebert, who had turned down Göring’s offer of the Berlin opera houses. Rudolf Bing, a Viennese, came with them and was soon running the company. In 1947 he started the Edinburgh Festival for Glyndebourne, and then ran the Metropolitan Opera in New York for twenty-two years.

The Long Interval

Every performance stops in the middle for ninety minutes, for dinner.

Most of the audience picnics. They bring tables, chairs, linen, glasses and a hamper, and take a place on the lawns or in the gardens, in black tie. The rest dine in the restaurants on the estate, or at tables under cover if it rains.

Black tie is the custom rather than a rule, and the audience keeps to it.

Bells ring ten, five and three minutes before the curtain.

The New House

By the 1990s the old theatre was too small. It was pulled down, and Michael and Patty Hopkins built a new house in its place: tiers of wood inside a shell of brick, for twelve hundred. It opened on 28 May 1994, sixty years to the day after the first Figaro.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra has been in the pit each summer since 1964, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment plays its share.

John Christie’s grandson Gus has been its chairman since 2000.

In 2026 the season opened with Tosca, the first Glyndebourne had ever staged.

What to Know

Members book first. Membership has a waiting list: an associate member waits ten to twelve years for a place in the Festival Society. Public booking follows.

Black tie.

The train from London Victoria goes to Lewes, where a coach meets it. By road it is about ninety minutes.

The gardens open two hours before the curtain, and are worth the time.

The mistake is to arrive with just enough time for the curtain. The best places on the lawn are claimed before the first act, and the picnic is laid out before anyone goes in.

The Court

Glyndebourne Festival Opera is not the Court’s own. Tickets are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: the car from London, where to stay in Sussex, and the table in the long interval, laid on the lawn before the curtain goes up.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.