Smiles of A Summer Night

By MARTHA DUFFY/SUSSEX

The story goes that two chorus members of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera were returning to the green but sodden meadows of Sussex, England, after a brief break in London. One said, "I'm so sick of all this rain." Replied the other: "Yes, but it is privileged rain."

That exchange about expresses the aura that surrounds Glyndebourne, one of the world's finest music festivals. The very drizzle is sacred. Young singers vie for a place in the chorus. Never mind that the time commitment is extravagant and the pay meager. To perform on this stage is to be recognized as an artist, not just another pair of vocal cords.

Opera fans, too, struggle to get to Glyndebourne, but tickets have always been virtually unobtainable. Much of the small house, 40 miles south of London, is presold to corporate and individual sponsors. For these wealthy people, an evening at Glyndebourne is a social rite, a rare chance to behave like a true English eccentric. Men dress conventionally in black tie. But the women present a fashion show rarely witnessed in the late 20th century: long gowns printed with cabbage roses and exotic shawls that must be relics of Britain's imperial past. For many in the Glyndebourne audience, the evening's high point is the single, 80-minute intermission, when the ladies stride onto the smallish lawn to seize and defend their favorite picnic spot and lay out a lobster and strawberry feast as cows gaze at them indifferently from the other side of the ha-ha.

But Glyndebourne is changing. Last week, amid fireworks and the blessing of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, the company opened a new theater that seats 1,200 -- the original seated 830 -- and that includes about 60 places to be sold at $15. The design is spare, even modest, making no attempt to impose itself on the landscape, and the acoustics are much better than those of the old house. At the opening, the company tried to keep gloating to a minimum. That must have been hard. The management had, after all, opened the only new opera house in England since the first Glyndebourne theater was built 60 years ago. They had done it within their budget of $50 million. Best of all, they had fulfilled their dream without taking a cent of public money.

But surely the most unusual aspect of this musical Shangri-La is the fact that it is set on private property. It was built in 1934 at the will of Sir John Christie, the scion of a rich, ancient family, who saw it as a showcase for the talents of his new wife, lyric soprano Audrey Mildmay. The current proprietor, John's son George, makes his home right next to what could be called the family store.

The wonder is that Sir John's original dollhouse theater survived so robustly. He was mostly his own architect. Sir George, 59, played it safer for the new building, hiring Michael and Patty Hopkins, who are also designing a major extension of the House of Commons. Sir George's demands were all but impossible to meet: make a bigger theater that loses little of the old one's intimacy, and be sure that the acoustics are rich and reverberant, like a concert hall's, but dry enough to allow every word to be distinct. Opera houses tend to have a thin resonance, partly because of the heavy use of carpeting and fabric, which trap sound instead of distributing it, and partly because singers like things that way. Judging by the opening performance of The Marriage of Figaro, Christie got his wish. The theater is handsome without being ostentatious. The interior is stark, but the warm pine walls save it from being dreary, impeccable modern. According to acoustician Derek Sugden, "Wood can be death unless it's stiff and thick. A softer grain will absorb low frequencies, which means there can be no richness in the sound." He and the Hopkinses decided to use pitch pine left around from Victorian warehouses. Waxed, it has a rosy glow. The modified horseshoe design solves the intimacy problem. Says soprano Alison Hagley, who plays Susanna in Figaro: "It's really more a circle than a horseshoe, and onstage I feel part of that circle. The audience is my friend and I am theirs."

Figaro was chosen to inaugurate the building because it was the opening opera in 1934. Then as now, the festival emphasizes Mozart and, in general, ensemble works. Glyndebourne has more arresting and ambitious productions in its warehouse. But if the Figaro sets were pedestrian, the cast lived up to the company's formidable reputation for ensemble excellence (though there were standouts, notably Hagley and Marie-Ange Todorovitch, as Cherubino). Poor Renee Fleming, as the Countess, was stuck with the staging's only coarse moments. Somehow director Stephen Medcalf thought to dramatize the lady's unhappiness by portraying her in a kind of sexual heat. While Susanna is singing "Dei vieni non tardar," Mozart's heavenly, healing, last-act aria, the Countess is writhing around a tree trunk.

For an intelligent, ambitious singer, Glyndebourne is a paradise. Promising beginners aim for the chorus in part because choristers are also the understudies. More established singers seek out Glyndebourne either to learn a role or to do spring cleaning on one they already know. But for an international star, going there is time consuming and economically disastrous. The commitment is to at least five weeks of rehearsals and about 14 performances, with a no-play-no-pay proviso and no stipend for rehearsal time. The top salary is $1,800 per performance; international stars earn as much as $12,000 a night. So Sussex gets them early or not at all: Pavarotti, Frederica von Stade and Kathleen Battle all passed through, but Domingo, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Cecilia Bartoli slipped the net.

The stars at Glyndebourne are the conductors -- Bernard Haitink led Figaro -- and the directors. Sir Peter Hall has done some of his best stagings here, as have Trevor Nunn and Jonathan Miller. But the key to Glyndebourne's success is the dozen or so coaches who prepare each opera meticulously. Beneficiaries liken their teaching to having a superb master class every day. Christie notes that "coaches have an awkward job mediating between the conductor and the singer. They need a feeling for what's best for the composer." Their ranks tend to be drawn from people on their way to becoming conductors or from would-be singers who just didn't have a good enough voice. Martin Isepp, a revered figure who has spent 36 years preparing the divas of tomorrow, says he "was a little of both." He explains the coach's role this way: "Singers' instruments -- their talent -- lie within the body, and that makes them vulnerable. They need a second pair of ears that they trust."

Glyndebourne houses many communities -- the hungry opera fans, the corporate swells with their rare-roast-beef complexions, the county gentry with their picnic hampers. There is also a large, thriving musical community in the folds of the Sussex hills. Singers who come as students stay on to buy houses. Performers who have gone on to bigger things return because of the good friendships and relaxed pace.

Todorovitch, who is based in Paris and not an old festival hand, found herself crying when the orchestra struck up God Save the Queen on opening night. "I thought that, after 60 years, they had the courage to try and improve on success. I thought the music doesn't change -- Mozart is always the same -- but here are all these young singers who are making him fresh again." Of all opera houses in the world, perhaps only Glyndebourne, with its setting and its devotion to singing rather than to stars, can evoke such tears.