A night at Garsington Opera plus a two-night stay at the magnificent Hartwell House

Garsington Opera and Hartwell House both celebrated their 30th anniversaries in 2019 – and we teamed up with them to offer a spectacular prize.

Garsington's spectacular opera house at Wormsley. Credit: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL
Garsington's spectacular opera house at Wormsley. Credit: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL
(Image credit: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL)
Country Life's avatar
By
published
in Features

The competition closed earlier in the year, and this page is presented for archive purposes.

In 1989, when late financier Leonard Ingrams founded an opera festival in the grounds of his Tudor home in Oxfordshire, he could not have predicted its swift success. Within a few years, Garsington Opera had established itself, drawing audiences in their hundreds for summer seasons in the gardens of Garsington Manor.

In answering the call of artistic endeavour, they were following in the footsteps of W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, guests of Bloomsbury Set Society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell some decades previously. In 2010, following Leonard's untimely death in 2005, the festival moved to the Wormsley estate in the Chiltern Hills, home to the Getty family.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Garsington Opera’s 2019 seasonThis year, the season starts with The Bartered Bride, ‘a celebration of Czech culture reimagined in the English countryside’, then Mozart’s masterpiece Don Giovanni, little-known Fantasio by Offenbach and Britten’s adaptation of Henry James’s Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw.Baroque and classical chamber orchestra The English Concert will give three performances of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 on period instruments; these events will be accompanied by an afternoon cricket match and the chance to visit the Getty Library.The 2019 season ran from May 29 to July 26. Visit www.garsingtonopera.org for further details.

Garsington Opera continues to champion new talent alongside the world’s best performers in its modern 600-seat venue – and in this anniversary year you can win the chance to experience it for yourself while staying in fine style at the magnificent Hartwell House (www.hartwell-house.com).

Hartwell House hotel in Buckinghamshire

Hartwell House hotel in Buckinghamshire
(Image credit: Nigel Harper)

We offered two tickets to Offenbach’s Fantasio at Garsington Opera on Thursday 11th July, with a gourmet picnic for two provided to enjoy during the interval.

What’s more, the winner and guest also enjoyed accommodation at Hartwell House the night before and the night of the Opera, namely July 10th and 11th.

The question we asked was as follows; the answer, of course, was 1989.

Country Life
Country Life

Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.

Latest