Waterperry Opera Festival

Pity Carl Maria von Weber. On the morning of 5 June 1826 a servant knocked on the door of his bedroom in Great Portland Street, and heard no response. Stricken by tuberculosis, and tortured by the ‘thick, dank, yellow’ London smog, Weber had died in his sleep, aged 39. He knew that he was dying, and he’d travelled to London to try and make as much money as possible for his wife and children. He spent his last strength on Oberon; a sprawling half-opera, half-pantomime that he had been assured would drive British audiences wild. So it was fitting that the Proms should commemorate the 200th anniversary of Weber’s death with a concert staging of his only English opera, warts and all.

Regarding Frederick Delius, how do we stand? In the 1930s, Sir Henry Wood believed that Proms audiences much preferred Delius to Holst, and most critics back then would have described him as a major British composer. Times change: if you took your music GCSE in the late 1980s, you’ll have sensed that the Bradford lad was no longer quite up there. But you might well have been taught by people who still remembered him as a giant, and there was also the legacy of that greatest of composer biopics, Ken Russell’s Song of Summer, in which Delius’s music explodes in sunbursts of passion and colour against Russell’s austere black and white cinematography.

Waterperry is one of the UK’s youngest summer opera festivals: it started up in 2018, at the northern limit of the species’ natural habitat. You leave the motorway at Oxford services and double back through the fields to the hamlet of Waterperry. Drive past the ‘Cats Crossing’ sign and the life-sized effigy of Rowan Atkinson (honestly) and you’re there. There’s a big house (slightly run to seed), a farm shop, a garden centre and a nursery containing the national saxifrage collection, which is not something you see every day. The opera festival squeezes in between them. Let’s do the show right here! Well, why not? The Barber was literally staged on the lawn. And if it rains? ‘We hope it won’t. Would you like a poncho?