Wagner’s Ring Cycle in a converted chicken shed. There is a touch of Fitzcarraldo about the story of Longborough Opera. One—celebrated in a ludicrously ambitious film by Werner Herzog—involved an Irishman trying to build an opera house in the Amazon basin. The other, while more comfortably situated in the North Cotswolds, is scarcely less grandiose.
Longborough was the vision—no, obsession—of a local builder, Martin Graham, whose own musical education began in the 1970s with the BBC Radio 2 programme Friday Night is Music Night. The education—by then with his wife, Lizzie—continued with Your Hundred Best Tunes, also on Radio 2. Lord Reith would have been pleased.
And then, in 1982, the couple watched the uber-Reithian 1982 Boulez Ring Cycle from Bayreuth on BBC2 and a kind of fire was lit. One day—in the barn across from their house—they would create their own opera company. And maybe, just maybe, stage a Wagner Opera.
Longborough has now been going for 33 years and the couple’s daughter, Polly Graham, is artistic director. The first Ring Cycle was produced in 2013—nine years later, a second has just ended.
Covid played havoc with the run-in to the second Cycle, directed by Amy Lane. But, in other respects, Longborough has thrived at a time when the world of British opera is feeling distantly forlorn.
Part of this is down to the Grahams’ inspired decision to hire Anthony Negus, now 78, as their musical director. Negus first went to Bayreuth—the festival Wagner himself created—as a 15-year-old in 1961. Thus began a life of deep immersion in the composer’s work, including years as an assistant to the legendary British Wagnerian, Reginald Goodall.
Negus knew the recordings of Furtwängler, Kleiber and Toscanini inside out, but had never conducted his own Ring. His arrival at Longborough coincided with the Grahams knocking down much of the old barn to increase its capacity (it can hold an audience of 500 and an orchestra of nearly 70) while installing a job lot of old seats from London’s Royal Opera House.
Build it and they will come. And they did. Within hours of the tickets for the 2024 Ring Cycle going on sale they were snapped up. Fifteen hours of intense music and drama, spread over four days, is not for the faint-hearted. But, happily, Wagner enthusiasts are made of sterner stuff.
I had been due to watch all four operas, starting on 4th July. Alas, Rishi Sunak announced his own version of Götterdämmerung for that day, with the result that my own experience this year was truncated to the last two operas.
I can report that the Longborough Ring Cycle can proudly take its place beside any in the world. The downsides are the obvious ones: a smaller orchestra and a less opulent production. The upsides are considerable—especially experiencing huge waves of sound and tumultuous drama in a comparatively intimate space.
It is, as it has to be, a pared-back production. There is one basic set for each opera, with an inventive (too inventive for some critics) use of back-projection.
I thought back to a conversation with Martin Graham, telling me how, with his building background, he’d sat watching a Royal Opera House production years ago, mentally costing how he could replicate the more elaborate Covent Garden stage sets for a fraction of the cost.
Back in 2013, there was a sense that some critics travelled to the North Cotswolds in a Samuel Johnson frame of mind—not expecting the Ring to be done well, but surprised that it was being done at all. Especially in a converted chicken shed.
They soon dropped their scepticism, for the singing and playing were of a very high standard indeed (“a triumphant success,” proclaimed the late Wagner scholar Michael Tanner.)
But this year’s production felt to me on a new level, with widespread critical agreement that Lee Bissett’s Brünnhilde, Paul Carey Jones’s Wotan and Julian Close’s Hagen were as good as you could expect from any opera house in the world.
The filming of Fitzcarraldo notoriously involved hauling a 320-tonne steamship over a hill. The creation of a gorgeous, adventurous opera house from the remains of a chicken shed in Gloucestershire may have been marginally less arduous—but no less miraculous.
