Glyndebourne, E Sussex nr Lewes - Opera House from Garden - postcard c.1970s

Postcard
Picture / Image:  Glyndebourne: the opera house seen from the Garden
Publisher:  none stated but printed by W. E. Baxter Ltd., Lewes
Postally used:  no
Stamp:  n/a
Postmark(s): n/a
Sent to:  n/a
Notes / condition: 
 

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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Glyndebourne (/ˈɡlaɪndbɔːn/) is an English country house, the site of an opera house that, since 1934, has been the venue for the annual Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Initially, operas were presented within the house but there is now a free-standing opera house on its grounds. The house itself, located near Lewes in East Sussex, England, is thought to be about six hundred years old.[1]

"There had been a manor house at Glynde Bourne (as it was often spelt) since the fifteenth century",[1] but the exact age of the house is unknown. Some surviving timber framing and pre-Elizabethan panelling makes an early sixteenth-century date the most likely.[2] In 1618, it came into the possession of the Hay family, passing to James Hay Langham in 1824. He inherited his father's baronetcy and estate in Northamptonshire in 1833 which under the terms of his inheritance should have led to him relinquishing Glyndebourne, but as a certified lunatic he was unable to do so. After litigation the estate passed to a relative, Mr Langham Christie, but he later had to pay £50,000 to persuade another relative to withdraw a rival claim.

Langham Christie's son, William Langham Christie, made substantial alterations to the house in the 1870s. First, a brick extension hid its seventeenth-century facade, while ornate stonework and balustrading was added. Then, in 1876, the architect Ewan Christian was engaged to install bay windows and add decorative brickwork to give the house the Jacobethan appearance which can still be seen from the gardens today. Some of the exterior of the older parts of the house can be seen from the driveway next to the theatre.

John Christie obtained the use of the house in 1913 after the death of William Langham Christie, his grandfather. He came into full legal possession of the estate in 1920. Among other renovations, he added to the house an organ room, 80 feet (24 m) long, in the process almost doubling the length of the south facade of the house. This room contained one of the largest organs outside of a cathedral in the country. It was built by the firm of Hill, Norman & Beard Ltd (bought by Christie in 1923). After the Second World War, John Christie made a gift of sections of the soundboards, pipes and structural parts to the rebuilt Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks (which had been destroyed in the Blitz); the case and console remain at Glyndebourne.

John Christie's fondness for music led him to hold regular amateur opera evenings in this room. At one of these evenings in 1931, he met his future wife, the Sussex-born Canadian soprano Audrey Mildmay, a singer with the Carl Rosa Opera company who had been engaged to add a touch of professionalism to the proceedings.[3] They were married on 4 June 1931. During their honeymoon, they attended the Salzburg and Bayreuth festivals, which gave them the idea of bringing professional opera to Glyndebourne, although Christie's original concept was for it to be similar to the Bayreuth Festival. As their ideas evolved, the concept changed to focus on smaller-scale productions of operas by Mozart more suited to the intimate scale of the planned theatre.