A Card From Glyndebourne, 1983

Some books come with a little extra. Tucked inside this English National Opera guide to Rossini's La Cenerentola was a small cream card from Glyndebourne Festival Opera, typed on 23 March 1983. Its message was simple: thanks for the cheque, and the new libretti would be ready at the end of April.

Cover of English National Opera Guide 1, La Cenerentola (Cinderella), Rossini, with an engraving of Cinderella seated by the hearth among doves — English National Opera Guide 1: *La Cenerentola (Cinderella)*, published by John Calder in 1980. The card was inside. Gohachi collection.

Glyndebourne, Spring 1983

That spring Glyndebourne was getting ready for a busy season: Idomeneo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Strauss's Intermezzo, Rossini's La Cenerentola and Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges. The new Idomeneo drew particular attention, because it was Trevor Nunn's first opera, at a time when he was best known for Cats and Nicholas Nickleby. Bernard Haitink conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In Intermezzo, Strauss's comedy of a stormy marriage, John Cox's 1920s-set production starred Felicity Lott.

So the guide and the card belong together: Rossini's Cinderella was on Glyndebourne's stage that very summer. Perhaps its owner read up before a July evening in Sussex. We can't know, but it's easy to imagine.

Glyndebourne's round brick opera house seen across a lawn and a tall hedge — Glyndebourne today. The opera house in this photograph opened in 1994, replacing the theatre of 1983. Photo: David Hawgood, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This was still the old Glyndebourne theatre, with black tie, picnics on the lawn and the long interval, a decade before the new opera house was built.

The Card

The card itself is the kind of thing nobody sends any more. It was typed by someone in the Information Office, with a phone number on an old STD code, and it confirms an order paid by cheque through the post. Today it would be an automated email, read once and forgotten. Instead, somebody kept it and slipped it into their opera guide, where it stayed for forty years.

We love finding things like this. It isn't rare or valuable, just a small, ordinary piece of someone's opera-going life that happened to survive inside a book.

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Written for Gohachi Books, October 2026, from the card and the guide in our collection.