“In Britain, these days, opera in the garden is all the rage. If you own a country house with grounds, you turn everything upside down in July and August to stage a home-grown Götterdämmerung (or for the fainter-hearted, Barber of Seville). And patrons, ideally in evening dress, picnic grandly on your lawns during intermissions… The phenomenon feeds on fantasy… the proprietors imagine they’ve traveled back in time, as 18th-century princelings with private courts and orchestras at their disposal, while they reinvent the Arcadian dream. Not that they readily admit it.”