Sheets of rain drive across the car park. The pillared mansion is only a couple of hundred yards away, but it's a long, wet walk in high heels, holding up the skirt of a ballgown and trying to shelter under an inadequate umbrella. Lugging the picnic hamper, the rug (already soaking) and the bulky programmes is a disgruntled man squeezed into a dinner jacket tailored for a figure once somewhat slender but now bulging. When they reach the tent, or a corner of the terrace under a canopy, they can shiver with the rest, drinking iced champagne and smiling brightly, putting on a good face, making the most of it, looking forward to the opera, but secretly wondering why on earth they hadn't stayed at home.
Is it only the British who enjoy this sort of charade? Since the Christies launched Glyndebourne in the 1930s, there has been a steady growth in country-house opera and music festivals all over the land. Glyndebourne certainly has the highest standards and is one of the great opera houses of the world, admired as much for its ensemble spirit as for its ability to spot potential. Aldeburgh, Benjamin Britten's much more austere East Anglian riposte (he founded the festival in 1948, after he fell out with Glyndebourne), has hosted the premieres of dozens of new works and has some pretty exciting concerts, especially now that it has started to cast off the ghost of Britten and his followers. The dozens of other organisations, with their gala evenings and fund- raising junkets, need to be approached with caution.
Year after year in the 1950s, the early evening TV news would send a cameraman to Victoria Station to film the first-night crowd gathered to catch the Glyndebourne train. The reporter would comment on their clothes and general turnout with a mixture of respect and jocularity.
Because no one viewing could be expected ever to get the chance to join the smart crowd, exactly what happened at the other end remained a bit of a mystery. Understandably, many people imagined that the performance took place in the open air. It was part of the silly season, and the news items strangely foreshadowed a similar one a couple of months later every year, which showed the merry hop-pickers from the East End setting out for their "holiday". Lobster and Moet et Chandon for the toffs, fish and chips and bitter for the lads and lasses, and everyone knew where they stood.
I think those Fifties newsreels must have planted a seed in the minds of many among those uncertain opera-goers who succumb to the lure of an evening at one of the Glyndebourne lookalikes. Consider this announcement, which was printed on the back of the booking form for one of them: "Most guests prefer to wear evening dress (black tie/long or short dress)." Can you imagine any other country where someone would bother to think that up? Consider the economics of such an evening. From the heap of programmes for this summer, take Longborough in Gloucestershire. The average price for a ticket is only £37, and a four-course dinner is on offer for £30. Assuming that a bottle of champagne is on ice, add another, say, £30. You need bed and breakfast for the night (it's a long, dark drive home), and the local is offering it for a snip - £115 per person. Not much change out of £300. It makes Covent Garden seem like Woolworth's. Now, I admit that I haven't actually been to Longborough, and the photographs in the brochure make it look very pretty indeed. The orchestra is made up of players from the City of Birmingham Symphony, one of the best orchestras in the world, so there can't be any complaints there.
If you must persist in this pastime, there is quite a range of music on offer around the country over the next few weeks. In Dartington, you might catch Astor Piazzolla's weird tango opera Maria de Buenos Aires; Buxton has Verdi's early comedy Un giorno di regno and Shostakovich's The Nose; Mananan on the Isle of Man features Bizet's Docteur Miracle; while later and further away, the always exotic Wexford has Massenet's Sapho, Dvorak's JakobIn and Flotow's Alessandro Stradella - at least you'll be able to impress your friends just by saying you have seen them.
Really, it's all the fault of Richard Wagner. He built his own opera house in the otherwise unremarkable town of Bayreuth in Germany, and then expected the world to come to him - as they still do, and each year the struggle to get hold of tickets becomes ever more wearisome for the faithful. All those would-be Wagners and Christies miss out on one essential point, however. Bayreuth and Glyndebourne have consistently offered the highest standards where staging, singing and playing are concerned. Bless their hearts, the others don't often reach the starting point.
There is another, typically English, bit of eccentricity going. A group called Opera Interludes, run by the baritone Philip Blake-Jones, will come and put on a reduced-scale opera in your own home. I suppose this could be termed "cabaret-opera" - and for those who don't want to risk travelling, it could be a boon.
What people tend to forget while planning their elaborate picnics is that we still have two of the greatest music festivals in the world - Edinburgh and the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts - which are both dead easy to get to, and tickets are always available. This year, Edinburgh has operas by Berlioz, Wagner, Mozart, Rossini, Rameau, Carlos Santos and James MacMillan. Ticket prices range from £55 to a fiver.
The Proms always intrigue me. Again, it's that rather arrogant, insolent, English thing. Here we have a festival on the most gigantic scale, involving thousands of performers, 81 concerts, broadcast to millions, attended by thousands of devotees, offering world premieres of 11 commissioned works and music from every corner of the repertory. And yet, to those outside, who have never been to a Prom, the whole thing is hijacked by a few dozen flag-waving loonies on every last night. "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves." OK, OK, it's just party fever and harmless. Yet, again, can you imagine any other country in which such a poor idea could be allowed to colour everyone's view?
The organisers will answer that it's all part of bringing art to the people, opening up boundaries, outreach - whatever that means - and we must allow it to do its work. But it is probably this that sends those bemused dinner-jacket types off on their wild-goose chases, searching for culture among the damask roses. As for me, I'd sooner have a sausage roll by the Albert Memorial and pay my £5 to hear Boulez or Ashkenazy.
Patrick O'Connor is a consulting editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Opera
