In June 1989, a small touring company performed Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro on the terrace of Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. The event had been arranged as a fundraiser for the Oxford Playhouse by Garsington’s new owner, the banker and musician Leonard Ingrams (brother of The Oldie’s founding editor, Richard Ingrams).
Leonard Ingrams had no intention of starting a festival, though that same year the Arts Council drove a coach and horses through southern England’s operatic landscape