Beginnings

Interleaved with the souvenir programme for the OUOC's 1975 produc-tion of Monteverdi's Orfeo was the club's appeal for funds, including an impressive list of patrons, donors, and guarantors. Among special features of the production, Striggio's libretto was newly translated by Anne Ridler. The conductor was Jane Glover, then a Senior Member of OUOC, who pro-duced a new edition of the score. Those 1975 performances of Orfeo, from Tuesday through to Saturday, 18–22 February, marked a golden jubilee. In December 1925, audiences at the old Oxford Playhouse, Woodstock Road, witnessed a remarkable operatic venture staged by a group of Oxford stu-dents, not yet constituting a formal organization but with hopes of doing so. The work chosen to launch their efforts was Monteverdi's Orfeo, in a new English translation. Contributing notes on the opera to the programme booklet, J.A. Westrup set out the rationale underpinning the enterprise: ‘We do not claim that every bar of this opera is supremely beautiful, but we do believe that it contains many pages which deserve a better fate than to lie undisturbed on the dusty shelves of the library’.

That 1925 production was extraordinary in two particular respects. First, Oxford had only a patchy cultivation of the genre over the centuries of opera's existence. As Eric Walter White recounted, in the mid-1920s when he was a student at Balliol College ‘there was no regular tradition of opera at the University waiting to be revived, although there had been several occasions in the past when some notable entertainments had been mounted’. While observing that ‘in the course of time various operatic pro ductions had occurred in the University, such as those of Fidelio and Der Freischütz directed by Sir Hugh Allen just before the outbreak of the First World War’, White added:

Secondly, until the Oxford production, Monteverdi's Orfeo had never before been performed in English. This was its British premiere.