Grange Park Opera

FT Magazine article by John Phipps

One rain-soft evening in May, about 80 wealthy donors arrived at West Horsley Place, a 15th-century manor house in the south of England. They had all been invited for dinner with the founder of Grange Park Opera, Wasfi Kani.

As sunlight edged through the clouds, elderly guests in eveningwear got out of luxury cars and made their way through the industrial side door of the 650-person theatre that Kani had built behind the house almost a decade ago. In a month, the summer season, for which Grange Park spends all year preparing, would begin. Flutes of English sparkling wine were issued to the crowd. As they gathered on the empty stage, Kani moved through them like a hawk among pigeons, able and willing to part them from their money.

Opera isn’t cheap. An opera festival must gather a huge corpus of professional singers, dancers, musicians, designers and technical staff to be worthy of the name. Kani raises £2mn-£3mn a year, each year, to help Grange Park mount four or five operas during the festival season. She also has to pay for the ambitious renovations that have become part of Grange Park’s appeal. Each June, returning patrons expect to marvel at grand new improvements to her Arcadian kingdom.

In a world where the business of patronage is usually conducted in tones of restrained euphemism, Kani’s fundraising style has become a kind of legend. She knows all her donors personally. She helps them through medical crises and brings them roses from the front of her house. A few weeks before the fundraiser dinner she had been in Sicily, putting 30 donors through their cultural paces. Her nous and nature is to be relentlessly personal in all things. “I thought I was a good fundraiser, but she’s the best,” said Dame Vivien Duffield, a grand British arts philanthropist and trustee of Grange Park. “She makes you her best friend, she really becomes part of your life — and then she’ll pounce.”

Kani is a highly theatrical public presence. While socialising, she seems to flicker between performances of different stock characters, and it’s not always clear if she knows she is doing it. At the dinner in May, she appeared behind a voleish consultant I was talking to. “Julian wrote to me with a complaint,” she announced, using what I would come to think of as her Circus Ringmaster’s voice. “He ended up giving me 20,000 pounds!” Julian smiled bashfully, as though at some stroke of great good fortune.

The night before, Kani had hosted another hundred or so friends of Grange Park Opera for an identical dinner. On both evenings she made a point of marching the grey-haired crowd up 57 steps to get to their seats. As we ascended, the stairwell echoed with cheerful protests and heavy breathing. Kani was raising money for a lift.

When Kani first started mounting opera in National Trust houses in the late 1980s, there was only one country house outfit to speak of. Opera mostly took place in urban theatres and was arranged by state-funded companies. Today there are five country house opera companies, while some of their state-funded counterparts are on life support. People who once had reservations about the idea of “mansion opera” now seem to have adopted an attitude of palliative pragmatism.

In the UK, country house opera has become part of what keeps the art form alive. For that you need donors, and for them what you really need is Wasfi Kani. At fundraisers, on social occasions — perhaps all the time — she plays the part not of a comfortable insider but of a seductive and powerful interloper, capable of taking the British elite by the lapels and bending them to her will. The question that has occupied parts of the opera world for 40 years is how much of this impression is a performance, and how much is Kani being herself.

At the dinner in May, I asked the man opposite me what made Kani so good at her job. As he started to answer, Kani clapped her hands hard, five or six times, a few chairs over. Projecting her voice as loudly as she could — which was very loudly — she ordered everyone to sit down. The man gave a deferential dip of the head.

“There you have it,” he said.

“Here’s a crazy idea,” said everybody. “Let’s put on an opera somewhere really beautiful in summer.” And so everybody did. In Italy, they sing Verdi in a Roman amphitheatre. In Austria, you can sit lakeside and watch Weber sung on a floating stage. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the singers appear against a backdrop of sunset and lightning on the distant Jemez mountains. The version of the idea that emerged in England was the country house opera festival.

Its origins lie in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, where in the 1870s the composer Richard Wagner built an opera house to host an annual festival of his own work. Outlining his theory of the ideal opera as a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, he argued that its grand 19th-century trimmings should subordinate themselves to the drama: “Its art is not complete until every helping artifice is cast behind it.” Bayreuth’s opera house had brilliant sightlines and a concealed orchestra pit that allowed for total darkness before the show. Its immersive unreality made it the prototype of the modern cinema.

In the 1930s, a British aristocrat called John Christie fell in love with a celebrated soprano, Audrey Mildmay. Christie had been to Bayreuth several times; now he decided he and his wife should create a festival of their own. They called it Glyndebourne, after the house. Exiles fleeing Hitler’s Germany helped make the festival an international success. For a long time it was almost impossible to get tickets without the membership that conferred a kind of social distinction in itself.

This year, about 200,000 people will dress up in their smartest clothes — black tie is common but technically optional, even at Glyndebourne — and travel to different parts of the country, where various companies now compete to sell a certain idea of England back to its establishment. All five are in southern England. Some have specialisms: Glyndebourne is known for top-drawer Mozart, Longborough for its love of Wagner. But, at each, the centrepiece of the evening is arguably the long, luxurious dinner interval, with some guests carting along expensive picnic hampers and others paying for a seat in the restaurant.

It is a crowded, competitive marketplace. I asked Kani if she worries about losing her donors to other houses. “Here is my public statement,” she said using her “You-See-Before-You-An-Ordinary-Playing-Card” voice. “There cannot be too much culture in the world.”

For some, the emphasis on hospitality detracts from the serious performance that should be taking place. For others, the country house format is redeemed precisely by its dedication to frivolity. “You don’t go to Bayreuth for fun,” said opera critic and historian Rupert Christiansen. “It’s not a nice evening out. It’s not a treat. Whereas country house opera is all about the good life.”

In her world, Kani has helped to pioneer the “event-as-theatre”: the total experience of the guest, from their arrival at the rose-studded front gates, to their exit through an avenue of flaming torches. The performances often begin with Kani onstage, thanking the audience for their help, or asking its individual members for money. During the interval she flits from table to table, crossing the pound signs on the cheques.

Kani counts actors and plutocrats among her friends and has two royal honours. Yet she often projects a profound ambivalence about the upper crust. She has been running a charity mounting musicals in prisons for almost as long as she has worked out of stately homes. (She recently started another initiative giving singing lessons in state primary schools.) Though she has lived her entire life in England, she told me more than once that she wasn’t English.

Kani is quick to give credit to her fiercely loyal staff for her achievement. But no one who visits Grange Park Opera could leave without understanding that everything is powered by the one-woman show taking place at its centre. The heat and friction she emits gives Grange Park its unique character. At the fundraising dinner in May, as Kani stood behind one of her consultants, stroking his shoulder,

I leaned over and asked how she did what she did. “I look people in the eyes and I hypnotise them,” she said, moving on down the table. The man laughed. The people around him laughed. In fact, everyone was laughing the entire evening. The whole thing looked a lot like a very rarefied form of entertainment. And a little like revenge.

When Kani was a child, she would stand on the windowsill with her back to the glass and the curtains drawn together in front of her. The theatre was a council flat in east London, and the audience was the family that could barely fit inside the rooms: four siblings, two parents. When she thrust the curtains apart, the performance began.

Kani’s parents were refugees, wealthy Indian Muslims who had fled the horrors of partition. In England, her mother sewed dresses. Her father worked for the General Post Office. Kani spent hours playing chess with him, exploring the manifold possibilities of a limited world. In 1968, when Kani was 12, the Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, about the threat posed by immigrants to the “Englishman”, provoked a wave of racial hatred. Overnight, Kani said, there were slurs in the playground and the streets. Her friends stopped talking to her.

Kani’s family didn’t have a record player, but when she was young her parents installed an old upright piano in their flat. She liked what she called “the puzzle” of practice. “You’ve got this big machine in front of you that sits silent, and you can go to it and you can create this huge sound,” she told me. “It can all happen as long as you fulfil the puzzle.”

Kani went from grammar school to Oxford university, then spent 10 years working in the City as a computer programmer. But, turning 30, she had a change of heart and returned to music, this time as a self-taught conductor. In 1987, she put on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in a west London church. She began touring operas round historic houses, towing the lighting rig in a trailer behind her. She also started a charity, Pimlico Opera, to put on productions of musical theatre in prisons.

Production standards were rickety all round, but that often seemed to help the audience feel they were partners in the evening’s success. People who saw those shows remember Kani as a slight figure in a Nehru jacket with charisma coming off her like a heatwave. “She was completely compelling as a presence,” said Matthew Sturgis, a friend from that time. “The whole opera was going on, but one’s eye was constantly drawn to Wasfi.”

In 1992, Kani became chief executive of Garsington, a small concern working in the 11-acre gardens of an Oxfordshire manor house. Its takings quadrupled under Kani’s stewardship. She had a rare dual-mastery of music and business: if the opera had an organ part she would play it herself — and note the saving in her next budget. She began looking around for somewhere to start a company of her own.

It was the late 1990s when Kani happened upon The Grange at Northington, a ruined mansion set in terraced grounds above a Hampshire chalk stream. A series of restorations in the early 19th century had converted it from a stately home into a reproduction Greek temple. “Nothing more satisfying than the line of the terrace,” scrawled one architect in his notebook, “the inclination to the water and the tufted trees finer and more luxuriant than ever grew on the banks of the Ilissus.”

The building was owned by John Baring, Lord Ashburton, the aristocratic head of the Baring banking family. Baring had once tried to demolish the building before the government stepped in to protect it, spending £500,000 weatherproofing the structure. To Ashburton, the place was a lovely ruin. For Kani, it was the most romantic place possible for an opera house. In years to come, Baring would talk about their first meeting with amused fondness. “As soon as he saw her eyes light up, seeing it for the first time, he knew he was in trouble,” said Simon Freakley, the long-standing chairman of Grange Park Opera. Kani pursued the property avidly. “I got a telephone call from Jocelyn [Stevens, the head of English Heritage],” Duffield, the philanthropist, recalled. “He said, ‘I’ve got this maniac sitting on my desk who won’t leave until I give her The Grange.’”

The building was derelict, but Kani built a small auditorium inside the conservatory, hanging a fine net over the theatre to catch chunks of falling plaster. “She knew where to spend money,” said the conductor Stephen Barlow. “If you touched the wall with a piece of clothing backstage, you came away with chalk stains.” She had a flair for non-finito touches that exposed the workings of her grand designs. Clay pipes and ginger-beer bottles were displayed like archaeological finds under glassed-in sections of restored wall. Often, at the beginning of the evening, Kani and Baring would appear on stage, sometimes accompanied by Baring’s black Labrador. “It was very distinct and exciting,” said Sturgis. “Everyone recognised that by being part of the audience they were being part of the opera.”

Each year visitors returned to discover changes: a new restaurant, or an expanded auditorium facing a different direction. In 2009, Kani bought back a historic staircase Baring had sold decades before. Her puzzle-world had expanded to encompass grand historic buildings and landscaped grounds. But now, the mechanism jammed.

The roots of the fight are obscure, but Freakley, the Grange Park chairman, told me this story. As time went on, Baring increasingly wanted to run profitable events like weddings in a property he felt was his. Kani wanted to continue running an opera in a venue she felt was hers. There was a personal breakdown in the relationship, Freakley said. (John Baring died in 2020. Representatives of The Grange and members of the Baring family contacted for this article did not respond to requests for comment.)

In March 2015, the Baring family moved to terminate the lease early. Kani had several singers already contracted for the 2017 season. She needed to find a replacement opera house. In a twist that would make a hack librettist blush, Kani read an article in The Telegraph detailing how the elderly television host Bamber Gascoigne had unexpectedly inherited his great aunt’s medieval mansion just outside London.

He had no idea what to do with it. Kani went with a small group of people to see Gascoigne and his wife, Christina, for tea and sausages, and asked to build an opera house in their garden. “I’ll never forget the words,” said Freakley. “Christina said: ‘Bamber, a beautiful bird has landed in our garden and we must welcome it.’”

Kani decided she would take as much as she could of her current opera company with her. A huge legal row emerged over what belonged to who, up to and including the name Grange Park Opera. “They were taking endless legal actions against us . . . that’s the posh-person style,” Kani told me. “He was the worst kind of English person.”

Kani borrowed an office in Mayfair and began taking meetings with donors. She commissioned a scale model of the theatre she was planning to build: a miniature version of Milan’s La Scala that would sit in the forest behind the house, West Horsley Place. In January 2016, a stockbroker called Michael Cowan came for a meeting. Kani remembered showing him a piece of paper that explained how the patron’s gifts would be commemorated in the new opera house. “He said, ‘If I give you a million pounds, I’ll have my name in the vestibule. Where’s the vestibule?’ So I got out my model, and I showed him the vestibule.”

In May 2016, Kani received planning permission for her theatre. At the end of that summer, the time came to move. “The legal advice was that all the lighting rigs and all the infrastructure, you know — including the lovely, former-Royal-Opera-House red velvet seats — were Grange Park’s assets, and therefore could be removed once the lease came to an end,” said Freakley. “And so that, indeed, is what we did.”

With every moveable part of her life’s work stored in warehouses, Kani had her builder drive huge steel piles into the ground to make foundations for the new opera house. Millions in pledged donations started pouring into the charity’s bank account. In spring, rehearsals began for the following season. “We arrived to rehearse and they were still building inside,” said the conductor Gianluca Marciano, who led the first production of Tosca. He watched dust from the drills fall gently throughout the final dress rehearsal. “I had to have the helmet to conduct.”

A few nights later, Grange Park Opera reopened with everything in place and Kani centre stage. The applause, she said, went on for five minutes. After that, an audience member told me, she began asking the crowd for money.

In March this year, I took a train out of London to HMP Bronzefield, a women’s prison where Kani’s charity, Pimlico Opera, was putting on a show. In 1989, Kani wrote to the warden of Wormwood Scrubs, asking if she could stage a production in the prison. He agreed. The idea became a 40-year charity effort surrounding a small core of professional singers with male or female prisoners. This year the show was Made in Dagenham. In the queue, everyone around me seemed to know Kani personally. The phrase “force of nature” came up a lot. “Oh, Wasfi,” said one man dreamily. “Once she gets you.” After passing through several sets of security doors, I came into the visiting hall and saw Kani moving through the crowd. As she approached, I put out my hand. “I don’t touch people,” she said briskly. This isn’t true, but it’s something Kani likes to say, I think because it keeps things interesting.

In the auditorium, we went to our assigned places on the metal bleachers. Later, I would learn that the seating, like the props, the lighting rig and every other object that was moved into the prison for the show, had to be arduously inspected by prison security when they entered or left.

Putting on a show in jail means doing it without your cast or your audience being able to move freely from room to room. Which means no interval for starters. After a speech by the warden, coloured lights began to flash, a live band hidden behind the set began to play and the cast launched into the chorus of their first song: “If you want something done/Ask a busy woman.”

Everyone seemed to know Kani personally. ‘Force of nature’ came up a lot. ‘Oh, Wasfi,’ said one man dreamily. ‘Once she gets you’

When I first asked Kani why she put on shows in prisons, she played down the benevolent side of things. “It’s a massive ball ache,” she told me over the phone, adopting her “Between-You-And-Me” drawl. She said she had the idea to put on that first prison show years ago because she’d gone to school behind the building. Confronted later with evidence of her good intentions, she conceded, “It is humbling what you and I have been given, and what they have not been given.”

Later, the head of HMP Bronzefield told me something else Kani hadn’t mentioned: that she’d presented the prisoners with bouquets after the final performance. I wondered if part of what drew Kani to the charitable side of her work was the sheer difficulty of managing it all. For a woman with a talent for logistical conundrums, it must have been like training with weights on. Kani seems possessed by what W B Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult”. For a while, I was surprised that she didn’t speak more about music. Eventually I understood that for Kani, these complex structures have a beauty and romance to match the opera itself. “There’s silence,” she explained. “There’s 100 people — the orchestra, the people on the stage, the whole load of other people — and from the moment we say ‘go’ they all work together seamlessly. And they create this extraordinary thing.”

What makes that possible is Kani’s ability to perform, to scandalise, to be outrageous. “When she’s up on her feet entertaining an audience, I think even she doesn’t know what she’s going to say,” Freakley told me. I understood what he meant. You catch your breath a little when Kani is talking. Richard Fairman, this newspaper’s opera critic, told me he once saw Kani stand on stage and tell an audience that a major patron’s name was an anagram for something obscene, he couldn’t quite remember what, related to masturbation. (“He’s got that wrong,” said Kani, when I put this to her. “Masturbation didn’t come into it.”)

The idea that I was asking people to talk about her seemed to alarm Kani. For a period, our communications became strained. But the week before our last scheduled meeting, she called me up and reiterated that I was invited to attend the opening night of Grange Park Opera’s Madama Butterfly that weekend. “Bring a friend, John,” she said, doing her “Iago’s-Intimate-Moments” voice. “You must have a friend.”

I have a wife. In early June we put on smart clothes and took the 15.03 service from Waterloo to Horsley. The sky outside was that freaky, uplit grey colour that lets you know it means business. The first drops of rain fell just as we stepped off the train; 10 minutes later we arrived at the opera house in a downpour. Women in flesh-coloured stockings picked their way across the lawn, their sensible flat shoes sinking into the wet ground. A man stomped past with visibly wet baguettes protruding from his M&S bag. My wife, who is South African, looked around with interest at the marquee full of shivering people. “This is just like our wedding,” she said brightly.

We found Kani in the champagne bar, stalking around in a black cape and sunglasses. Her diamanté trainers were soaked through. “I’ve got about seven influencers in tonight,” she said, in her “Divorced-Father-At-the-Concessions-Stand” voice. “They’re a bunch of spongers.” I went to ask her a question. “NO QUESTIONS,” she yelled. Kani’s shouting has no dramatic colouring. It throws all its resources into pure volume. I stared at her dumbly. “Give us a smile, John!” she cried, back in ringmaster mode. A man in a dinner jacket came over and threw a courtly arm out towards her. Kani launched her whole body into the air, away from him. “I DON’T TOUCH PEOPLE!” she bellowed. (Later, I asked Kani about this. She said that she doesn’t shake hands to avoid getting sick, “I meet an abnormal number of people”; that she certainly doesn’t shout, “You have never heard me shout”; and that if she sometimes spoke loudly, it was because “this is showbiz”. She then wondered if the FT would let her write a profile of me.)

She caught sight of the consultant whose complaint had ended in a £20,000 donation. “Julian!” she called, intimating to me that I had to hear this story. I said I already had. Kani lost interest and went over to the bar, picking up a half-empty glass of champagne and dumping it into her own. From over the heads of the crowd, I heard her bellowing the words “SO PISSED OFF”. A man beside me jumped slightly. “She used to be his boss,” the man’s wife told me. “His heart still beats faster when he hears her voice.”

Someone came past clanging a great brass bell, and the guests filed over to the theatre, picking their way round the puddles that had formed outside. Inside, the house lights went down. Kani came onstage and said she was only there to warm herself under the stage lights. She looked down at the orchestra. “Give us a smile, George!” she cried. Then she thanked everyone for making the opera possible and withdrew. The conductor came out and the anxious fugato of Madama Butterfly’s prelude began.

An hour later, we emerged for the interval and took our places for dinner in the restaurant. After 20 minutes, Kani came up to our table holding a diagrammed map of the restaurant with a list of names marked “Interesting”. I asked if we could look at it and she held the paper up, narrowing her eyes to slits. She asked if my wife and I wanted to go on a tour.

Over the course of our three meetings I had become accustomed to Kani doing slightly odd things: removing my tie because I hadn’t knotted it properly; ordering me out of a corridor; jogging away from me during an interview; taking my notebook to draw a diagram of a steam train she wanted to build; and at one point doing an unflattering impression of my own voice back to me. Now, as I got up to follow the elegant silhouette of my wife out of the room Kani turned round, gave me a warning, two-finger jab to the pouch of the cheek, then steered my wife into the dining room where a table full of people beamed up at Kani as at an old friend.

“You’ve come before,” said Kani, leaning down towards a grey-haired woman. “Does it normally rain?”

“No,” said the woman.

“NO!” bellowed Kani, holding out her arms and bringing her clenched fists down in a posture of fury. She took us upstairs to meet a famous fund manager whose opera Kani had premiered at Grange Park a few years before. As we spoke, she pressed herself against his wife, arms around her neck. Coming downstairs, I felt my wife brushing down the back of my blazer with the familiar vigorous motions reserved for chalk and dust stains. “I was gonna leave that on,” said Kani. “I think it’s good for him.”

She dropped us back at our table and left, returning just once to press both of our hands and make us solemnly promise her that we would have children. Then it was over. Through the windows, the skies had cleared. We walked through the gardens as the evening birds began to sing, and returned to our seats.

After the show, we joined a crowd of friends and donors having drinks on the stage and meeting the singers. Kani stood in the centre of the crowd, every one of whom seemed more interested in her than the performers they were ostensibly there to meet. I begged her to let me ask a question. Just one softball. I gestured to the empty opera house. How do you feel, I asked, looking out at all this?

“I think it’s great!” Kani said. Then she dropped into a new and urgent voice I hadn’t heard before. “And it’ll all be here when I die. I didn’t do it for me, you know.”