The Glyndebourne Emigres – Operatic Mobilities in Southern England, 1934–1940

In its first years of existence, in the 1930s, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera set out to internationalize English opera culture, both by attracting international artists and leading proponents of a new concept of opera production and by giving émigrés the chance to further hone skills developed in Central Europe and beyond.

The first five years of productions were marked by the collaboration of Artistic Directors, Fritz Busch and Carl Ebert, and the festival’s General Manager, Rudolph Bing, all of whom had emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1933. Beyond these architects of the festival, Glyndebourne employed the talents of many other émigrés, including the young conductor Hans Oppenheim, singers Irene Eisinger and Ina Souez, and répétiteur Jani Strasser. Many of these individuals sought refuge from fascism, and each contributed substantially to the achievements of the festival during its formative years.

This book is the first to fully consider the impact immigrants had on the early Glyndebourne project. Using frameworks developed by scholars of mobility and migration, it is also the first to explore the festival as a place both bounded and unbounded by the Sussex Downs―as a festival created in England, but also in the far-flung sites in which the work of Glyndebourne was often accomplished.

Nils Grosch is University Professor of Musicology and Head of the Department of Art, Music, and Dance Studies at the University of Salzburg. His research and teaching focus in particular on music and migration, music and media, and musical theatre. His previous research project, ‘Music and Migration,’ set itself the goal of discussing concepts such as mobility, exile, identity, and integration in musical migration research with the production of a collection, Musik und Migration (Waxmann Verlag).

Beth Snyder is an Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas. Formerly, she served as Research Associate on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Music, Migration and Mobility’ project based at the Royal College of Music, Royal Holloway University of London, and University of Salzburg. She is a graduate of New York University’s doctoral program in musicology, whose work has been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Twentieth-Century Music.