Operas are not the only joy

Glyndebourne may conjure up an image of champagne and evening dress, but for the radical writer Jeanette Winterson, it's heaven on earth

Glyndebourne is more than a night at the opera; it is music for the rest of your life. Forget fancy. Forget toffs. Forget silk bow-ties and Jimmy Choos; you'll want to wear those anyway, probably in the same outfit, but if you prefer goth leather or something you sewed for yourself the night before, you won't be made to feel out of place.

One of my favourite stories is of the cheery chappie, all in tails, who decided to cool his wine in the lake. During the interval he went to the lake to retrieve it, and fell in. Crestfallen and bedraggled, he was about to make his exit when a member of staff spotted him, took him to Wardrobe, fitted him out in brand-new kit sent him in for the second half - and laundered his lake-sodden outfit, ready for him to take back on the bus at 10 o'clock.

The bus! The bus is a Glyndebourne institution. If you catch the train to Lewes, a bus will speed you to the opera house, and speed you back to the station for the last train to London. It is wonderfully old-fashioned, in the right way. It feels like being inside Virginia Woolf's diary - she and Leonard were always catching or meeting the London train. "To Charleston yesterday in the rain. I take the train to Lewes; shop; 4:35 bus, reach Charleston for tea" (17 August 1937). Whether or not you choose to visit nearby Charleston, home to Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell and her lover, the painter Duncan Grant, buses and trains are somehow essential to the Glyndebourne experience.

You can pile down there in your car and enjoy free parking on site, but then you would miss the wonderfully surreal event of ladies in full evening dress and men in penguin suits sedately travelling standard class on the afternoon train to Lewes. These visions from another life carry picnic baskets and handsome travel rugs, and from time to time they take modest sips from hip flasks hung at gun level under their DJs.

It is true that we are dangerously close to the Glyndebourne stereotype here, but it is not without artifice. Stereotypes are by definition just themselves - no artifice. Here are people who have decided to DRESS UP, and they are playing it as hard as anything out of Noël Coward, which is why it is a game, not a class nightmare.

On the train, too, are kids with more piercings than a medieval martyr, guys so gay that they could no more climb in the closet than get back to Narnia, geography teachers in flat shoes (sorry, I stole that from Emma Thompson), elderly love-birds wearing M&S and reminiscing about that Rape of Lucretia - yes the one with Kathleen Ferrier in the title role - in 1946. Then there's always the just-a-tweak S&M little lezzos, drooling over star mezzo Sarah Connolly cross-dressing as Julius Caesar (2005). And someone - male, female, could be either, travelling alone, upright, watchful - whose whole life is this music.

I love the train to Glyndebourne - but then I love Glyndebourne, because it is absolutely English in the best sense, and truly inclusive in its welcome. Whoever you are, all that is required is that you come in the spirit of adventure and enjoyment, and have a good time.

Too expensive? Forget that too. Yes, you can spend a small fortune if you want to, and you might want to do that, if it is a special occasion, or you long to wow the new boyfriend/girlfriend, or even your lover of the last hundred years, or just for yourself, because one day you wake up and think GLYNDEBOURNE! That is what happened to me; I suddenly, desperately wanted to be there, and I was lucky because Ruth Rendell, a life-long Member (there is a 20-year waiting list), felt sorry for me, and took me to see Porgy and Bess starring Willard White, and no expense spared.

But suppose it hadn't been for Ruth? I could have gone online and got in for 10 quid, or just tried on the day and stood at the back for nearly nothing. There are always returns, and there are always cheap seats. If you want to bring a bowl of cornflakes and a cheese triangle, you can picnic on the lawn with the best of them, and you can see the show for less than a ticket to The Da Vinci Code.

But you do need a bit of persistence, because Glyndebourne is smallish, and the season is short, and there isn't a 20-year Members' waiting list for nothing. There is treasure here, and as with all treasure, it takes a bit of heft, sometimes, to dig it out.

I think about Glyndebourne the way I do about wild salmon, which will have the purists reaching for the rifle. What I mean to say is that it is special and it is seasonal, and it costs a bit more than the farmed stuff, but it is the real thing. If life is about heightened moments, and living well when we can, then Glyndebourne is an essential part of life.

I would not want to be without it. Opera is the fusion of drama, language, instrument and voice. It is high pleasure, in that it is a bit demanding, and high altitude, in that it is human beings at their most intense. Opera demands enormous skill from everyone involved, and what it asks from the audience is innocence and concentration. We can be critical, but not cynical. We can be reserved, but not lazy - as the Buddhists say, "Be Here Now."

Opera is a "be here now" situation, and Glyndebourne lends itself to the wrap-around moment, partly because it is so absurdly serious - a place in the middle of nowhere that starts singing mid-afternoon, and suggests that you come. And a place that asks you to give over your whole day to this spectacle. Even if you think you hate opera, Glyndebourne is the perfect antidote to fit-it-in frenzy. Everyone relaxes, everyone begins to open up to the beauty of the place, and of course to the music.

The music began in 1934, when a rather shy John Christie met a rather sparkling Audrey Mildmay, an opera singer. They fell in love, and as Christie happened to have a stately home, he offered it as a love-gift to his wife. They would start an opera house together, get a few Members to subscribe, and the rest, as they say, is music history.

Glyndebourne is still privately owned and run by the Christies, and it receives no public subsidy. In case you just read past that quickly, let me do it again: no public subsidy. Well, all right, the tour gets some dosh from the Arts Council, but then it has to visit places like Stoke-on-Trent, so fair enough.

So when you go and trip over some preening creature wastefully sloshing the Taittinger over the lawn, don't worry about it - he is paying every penny himself. More importantly, he is also paying for world-class opera in the most lovely setting, and hooray, you can go too. That's what I call democracy.

Glyndebourne started with Mozart, and this year Nicholas Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, returns after 10 years to direct Cosi Fan Tutte. It is a great opera, and Mozart has become universally adored. The production opens the season and will be much sought after, but my spy in the box office tells me that there will be tickets available for the determined. If that sounds a bit like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, well, it is.

My hot buys this season are Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera, directed here by Deborah Warner, hitting the bull's-eye as usual, and the triumphant Giulio Cesare, David McVicar's award-winning mix of Bollywood meets Handel. Cesare had the audience jumping in the aisles last year. It was magnificent, in no small part due to the combined talents of Sarah Connolly as Cesare (don't ask, it's a trouser-role, unless you can get a castrato, which is painful these days) and the debut rising star Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra.

McVicar often pulls the same stunts again and again, which can get a bit tiring if you are an opera regular, but here, he just pulls it off. It works for opera aficionados and opera virgins alike. De Niese, who is gorgeous, can act, dance * *and sing. She's a real find, and in one of those happy accidents of opera, was only booked at the last minute when the cast singer fell ill. I would queue all night on the lawn for this.

Deborah Warner's Fidelio offers what we have come to expect from a director who excavates the music to arrive at truth. Set in a modern prison, exploring what it means to be free in the world, and free in spirit, this story of one man's incarceration and his wife's determination to liberate him explores too how gender can become a prison of its own.

Dressing as a male guard to be near her husband, Leonore/Fidelio finds herself the love object of the prison governor's daughter. Warner never lets this turn into a joke, and the victorious finale is underscored with pain.

Opera is good at complexity, and all of Glyndebourne's shows this season have something disturbing in the lower regions. In Fidelio, Cesare and Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, we confront cross-dressing and crossed sex. It is all too easy to fall for the wrong kind - ass, boy/girl, girl singing as boy, and so on. In Cosi, Betrothal in a Monastery and Die Fledermaus, we meet sexual come-uppance and who's-kissing-who identity confusion. Opera is a kind of torment for the conventional mind - not only is it stuffed with trouser-roles, or counter-tenors who make The Bee Gees sound like baritones, it is always throwing together the wrong people at the wrong moment. And if you think everyone just takes off the mask and lives happily ever after when the curtain falls (like Shakespeare, ha ha), then it's not the music, but the director who is misleading you. If you long for life's straight and narrow, don't go to the opera. If you want to enjoy life differently, get a ticket.

Radical? Yes it is. Opera is subversive, definitely not submissive. Opera is a present-tense art form, not some moth-balled number from the days of snobbery and stupidity. It is true that there are terrible dreary dead productions that could put you off for life - Covent Garden's Ring cycle, for instance; not Wagner's fault, and not the first-rate Richard Jones production that they ditched at vast cost to drag in Mr Ordinary, Keith Warner. Bad opera is worse than bad sex.

It is true that opera companies - the subsidised ones, like Covent Garden - can afford to waste money and bore you senseless. Glyndebourne scores because whatever money it wastes is its own. It needs to sell out to continue, and it sells out not by selling out and putting on easy crowd-pleasers for the rah-rahs, but by producing edgy work with first-rate singers and world-class production.

Glyndebourne must continue to break ground - and that includes using more women directors, and directors with a different background to the gay/straight white male - of which, this season, there are five out of six. If Glyndebourne gets too complacent, too comfortable, it will keep a certain kind of audience - the one you might expect - but it will lose the new kind of people, younger, funkier, that it has begun to attract.

I say this not as a despoiler of something I love, but as a warning. It is easy to bring in the same old faces, and a few safe pairs of hands. It is to Glyndebourne's credit that the Christies still have a taste for adventure. Let's hope that doesn't fade.

Take your own champagne. Sit on the lawn. Dream over the lake. Lose yourself in the music. There are no rules, except that you respect the place, the opera, and your fellow guests. So laid-back and hands-off is Glyndebourne as far as rules go - no notices, no nasty men on bicycles patrolling the grounds, no Ealing Comedy dinner-ladies slopping out the pudding, so easy altogether is the feel of the place - that a bunch of chavs fetched up with their Tesco ready-to-lite barbecue and got out the six-pack and sausages. As the smoke wafted across the ha-ha, Health and Safety were deployed to put the fire. So, no barbecues - but otherwise, it's just ordinary good manners and no chocs in the theatre.

Dining is a choice of three restaurants, from the quietly formal to the refreshingly simple; or call and order a picnic and collect it with cutlery, crockery and wine when you arrive; or bring your own sandwiches; or go the full monty and get out Auntie's tablecloth and the battery-operated candelabra (spotted last year).

The 90-minute dinner interval is a chance to respond to both the music and the setting. This is hedonism, yes, but of the thoughtful kind that fills body and soul with good things, and makes space for better things to follow. Eavesdrop on any conversation, and people in happy groups will be arguing about what they have just seen and heard. It's total immersion, and that in itself is a release and a relief from modern life that thrives on fragments.

Just go, that's all I can say. Forget everything you have heard, even the good stuff, even this that you are reading now. Just go and hear it for yourself, in the moment.

There is nothing like Glyndebourne, and it has survived for more than 60 years because it works. It is a mixture of commitment and eccentricity, of the world-class and the determinedly local. It is still someone's house; the Christies and their children live there, and the opera happens around them. In the land of the corporate and the bureaucrat, the daily, homemade un-institutional feel of Glyndebourne is priceless. Part of its welcome is its own sense of occasion. Just as when John Christie gifted it to Audrey, Glyndebourne works around the singers, who all stay in the house, eating and working as a family.

A light is always on somewhere, and late at night, if you walk beneath the windows, someone is singing. Across the garden the owls and sheep make up the chorus. Yes, you can land your helicopter here, but why would you want to? Catch the train, pack a picnic and spend at least one day this summer at Britain's best opera house.

Glyndebourne Festival, East Sussex (01273 813 813; www.glyndebourne.com), today to 27 August

SIX TO SAVOUR: THIS SUMMER AT GLYNDEBOURNE

COSI FAN TUTTE

Director Nicholas Hytner's magic touch is evidenced by his ever-popular Xerxes: will he pull it off again with Mozart's bitter comedy? It bodes well that the designer is Vicki Mortimer, whose previous Glyndebourne exploit was the brilliant Miserly Knight/Gianni Schicchi double bill. Conductor Ivan Fischer will infuse the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with Hungarian fire. The young cast are new to Glyndebourne, but some are already stars. Those who heard Miah Persson as Susanna in Covent Garden's Figaro will know what a spell she'll cast as Fiordiligi.

BETROTHAL IN A MONASTERY

Described by Shostakovich as one of Prokofiev's most radiant works, this sparkling take on Sheridan's The Duenna will allow Glyndebourne's music director Vladimir Jurowski to develop the Russian strand he's introduced. The cast, led by Viacheslav Voynarovsky (unforgettable as the Doctor in Schicchi), is predominantly Russian, with the Georgian Nino Surguladze (a recent star of the ROH Eugene Onegin) adding mezzo-soprano ballast. Alan Opie and Jonathan Veira bring charisma to character parts.

DIE FLEDERMAUS

The last time Pamela Armstrong and Sir Tom Allen appeared in this opera at Glyndebourne, they sang in German: this time they will do so in a new English translation by the director Stephen Lawless and Daniel Dooner. With an Eisenstein and a Rosalinde of the calibre of these singers, success is assured. Opie and Veira will be back, aided and abetted by that mellifluous tenor Bonaventura Bottone, whose impeccable comic timing has enlivened the Coliseum stage for the past 20 years. Jurowski, again, will conduct.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Peter Hall's resplendent realisation of Britten's great opera was first seen on this stage 21 years ago. It still seems fresh. The casting this time round is highly promising: the young American counter-tenor Bejun Mehta assumes the mantle of Oberon, with the Costa Rican Iride Martinez opposing him as Tytania. Timothy Robinson - a terrifying Captain Vere in Billy Budd and a stuttering Vasek in The Bartered Bride - will play Lysander, while that lustrous Swedish mezzo Tove Dahlberg is Hermia and the luminous British soprano Kate Royal is Helena. Larger-than-life Matthew Rose will extract comedy as Bottom.

FIDELIO

Deborah Warner's Fidelio premiered at Glyndebourne five years ago with a disablingly unheroic singer in the key role of Leonore. Audiences are luckier this time, as the stylish German soprano Anja Kampe sings the role. Warner has tweaked her production, but this grungey take on Beethoven's only opera will probably still divide the critics. What will not, however, is the conducting: the podium will be occupied in alternation by Mark Elder and Edward Gardner. Elder, these days, can do no wrong; Gardner (about to take the helm at ENO) is the rising star.

GIULIO CESARE

Last year's hit is this year's hot ticket. Director David McVicar took all kinds of liberties with Handel's lovely opera, but the strategy paid off. Robert Jones's designs are a delight, and Danielle de Niese (left) will bewitch as Cleopatra. On the podium is that brilliant young Baroque specialist Emmanuelle Haim; David Daniels, doyen of counter-tenors, sings the title role, and Katarina Karneus sings Sesto.

Michael Church