Longborough Festival Opera
We – along with every other kind of arts organisation – have a schools programme.You might go in and they’ll think: “Oh, that’s only for clever people” or “That’ll be really boring.” But at the end of the day, and you ask how they like it, without exception they always say: “It was great! I didn’t know it would be like that!” And some end up begging to come to a rehearsal. At the end of the day, it’s simply exposure – that’s what it is all about. A lot of people think Wagner is difficult, but everybody’s heard The Ride of the Valkyries – and I’ve yet to meet a child that didn’t love it.
different challenge. Certainly one and possibly two will present a colossal challenge, because they’ve got very big choruses. One of the reasons we’re doing Tannhäuser this year is because it’ll give us an idea of how many people we can have in the chorus, how many people we can accommodate onstage. CH: What’s Tannhäuser about? LG: Like a lot of writers, Wagner kept writing about the same thing all the time really! This is one he really struggled with, knowing what he wanted to say but not quite sure how to say it.
Back when I was in my twenties and first going to the opera, it was always helpful if there was a tune I knew that I could look out for. That really helped. Now, I love going to new opera, to modern opera, and all the things I haven’t been to.
[The character of] Tannhäuser is Wagner, really, torn between the call of art and noble life and on the other hand wanting all the pleasures of the world. The two are embodied in the ‘good woman’ and the ‘bad woman.’
CH: What’s the next grand ambition?
He’s torn in the way that many people are – caught between the good that they want to achieve and also their longings for pleasure, for beauty. How do you reconcile those things? That’s really what it’s all about: life, really!
LG: Oh, we’ve still got ambitions! Now the Ring is done, our aim is still to stage all of Wagner’s operas. We did Tristan und Isolde last year, and reviving that again next year, and we’re doing Tannhäuser this year…Wagner only wrote ten ‘biggies’, so to speak, and by the end of this year we will have done six. Each one of the remaining four will present a
[Wagner] did several versions of it, and what we’re using is a combination version. There’s not one straightforward version that you can use because he kept going back to it. Our conductor told me that at the end of his life, Wagner said: ‘I still owe
the world a Tannhäuser.’ He viewed it as a work in progress, obviously. Again and again, throughout his work, you see characters that he’s invested a lot of himself into – and the problems that he had. CH: Lizzie, how did you first encounter opera? Theatre is really where I started. That’s the other thing about opera – if you like theatre, chances are you’ll like opera, because opera is like Theatre Plus, or even Plus Plus. I used to think that opera was silly and boring, like bad theatre, but now I’ve seen the light [laughs]. So I came from the theatre side, whereas Martin came from the music. Music has always been like a drug for him, really. I was sixteen when I saw my first two or three operas, which were okay, but I wasn’t that keen to go back. In my late twenties I thought I’d give it another go, and was hooked. I went to two Puccinis in the space of three weeks – Butterfly and Tosca – and I was totally bowled over. I thought it would all take ages…that somebody would be dying, that they’d be singing for hours while they were dying, and it’d all be very boring – but it all went like a flash! And so I thought: what have I been missing all my life? It was a real Road to Damascus moment, and I never looked back after that. www.cotswold-homes.com
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