Longborough Festival Opera

After its initial start and after a series of chamber music concerts in the drawing room of the founders' house, Banks Fee, Travelling Opera, a small touring opera company, was invited to give two performances with a small orchestra on a temporary stage in the courtyard of the stable block in aid of the charities Sue Ryder Care and Barnardo's.

[4] A barn was then converted into a theatre, using seats from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, which were being discarded during the refurbishment of the late 1990s.

Longborough Festival Opera (LFO) specialises in the works of Richard Wagner, making use of its orchestra pit, which is modelled on that at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus and accommodates 72 players.

The 2007 season featured the first instalment of a new full-length Ring Cycle: Das Rheingold, sung in German with an orchestra of 60 players conducted by Anthony Negus.

In Wagner's bicentenary year, 2013, the whole cycle was staged;[8] it is believed that this was the first time that this has happened in a privately owned opera house.