Director Peter Sellars is impressed with demonstrations against the war in Iraq, but under no illusions that American policy will soon change. “We have different timelines. I’m accepting that for the next few years the headlines belong to [US Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld. Our job as artists is to work for the next twenty years. I’m under no illusion that anything happens overnight. The real work is long-term. I have just come from Glyndebourne, working on Idonomeo and Theodora. These are pieces by artists from two different generations, Mozart and Handel, who were putting forward ideas – the end of autocracy and so on – that became the American revolution. That’s what artists must do.”