Anti-Wagner season at Longborough

Wahnfried, Pelléas et Mélisande fill a gap at the "Bayreuth of the Cotswolds"

Mark Lebrocq (Houston Stewart Chamberlain) and Meeta Raval (his first wife, Anna) in Wahnfried; Brett Polegato (Golaud) in Pelléas et Mélisande Pictures © Matthew Williams-Ellis

The past year has been a period of adjustment for Longborough Festival Opera. Its founder, Martin Graham, died in April at the age of 83, while the current programme marks a significant (if temporary) shift away from the Wagner productions with which it made its name.

Graham’s passion for Wagner led him and his wife Lizzie to found the festival - affectionally dubbed ‘The Bayreuth of the Cotswolds’ - in the Gloucestershire countryside in 1991. After the conductor Anthony Negus, a noted Wagnerian, became part of the Longborough ‘family’ in 2000, the festival mounted its first production of Der Ring des Nibelungen - initially in a reduced orchestration. It was the only UK company to perform a complete cycle of the tetralogy in 2013, the composer’s bi-centenary, and last year’s three cycles had an accompaniment big enough to fill Longborough’s ‘Festspielhäuschen’ to grandiose effect.

After that Herculean effort, one can forgive Longborough for taking a breather. However, the 2025 programme juxtaposing Wahnfried - The Birth of the Wagner Cult by 50-year old Israeli composer Avner Dorman with Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, a masterpiece inspired by Wagner’s music, proved too much of a challenge for many of Longborough’s Wagnerite faithful, who have become addicted to its modest stagings of the Master of Bayreuth’s works.