Longborough Festival Opera Founder Martin Graham has Died, Aged 83

Graham chaired the festival’s board of trustees for more than two decades

Born in Yorkshire in 1942, Martin Graham is best known for founding the Longborough Festival Opera (LFO) in Cotswold, UK, with his wife Lizzie in 1991. 

Originally a summer concert series, the festival grew to stage full-scale operatic works, including Wagner’s Ring Cycle — a project rarely attempted outside major opera houses. 

Graham had no formal music training and was first introduced to classical music by an elderly couple in his village who had access to a large record collection, including music by Mozart, Schubert, and Haydn. 

It was after a Wagner opera performance he attended with Lizzie that he was inspired to establish an opera house where staging The Ring could be possible. 

He started building his opera house by clearing out redundant farm buildings at his residence, where he dug an orchestra pit modelled on the one at Bayreuth Festspielhaus to fit 72 players. 

He also used seats from the Royal Opera House discarded during its refurbishment, and doors from an old officers’ mess for the auditorium. In total, the opera house could seat an audience of 500.

At the time, Graham was often called the “Prince Ludwig of the Cotswo​lds,” which was a reference to “Mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria, by whose patronage Wagner built the Bayreuth Festspielhaus to showcase his own works. 

The venue was first used as a theatre in 1997, with productions of Carmen and Don Giovanni. The LFO put on its first Wagner production in 1998 and went on to perform the full Ring twice — once in 2013 and again in 2024 in a production conducted by Anthony Negus and directed by Amy Lane.

“People say, ‘Wasn’t it complicated? Who was the architect?’” Graham told The Daily Telegraph in 2017. “I say, ‘Bugger a bloody architect! It’s just a big shed.’ Go to any opera house – they’re just long, tall sheds... There were no plans for how we were going to turn the shed into a theatre. I just went out into the field with a spade and this was the result … People didn’t know whether we could pull it off. But we did. You’ve got to go against the herd in this world. You don’t want to be like everyone else.”

“Martin was an inspiration to all of us at Longborough Festival Opera and he will be hugely missed,” the LFO wrote in a tribute. “As founder of the company his influence has been incalculable. His theatre has brought joy to thousands.”

Mr. Graham is survived by his wife Lizzy, their daughter Polly, now artistic director of LFO, and their other daughter Cordelia and son Leo, both of whom are LFO trustees.

Our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.