'Opera must never offend just for effect,' says Glyndebourne's new general director

For the sentimentalists among us, it bodes well that four of Glyndebourne’s founding fathers – Carl Ebert, Fritz Busch, Jani Strasser and Rudolf Bing – were of similar middle European or German extraction.

What qualifies Schwarz in a more concrete sense is that the Theater an der Wien is in many respects comparable to Glyndebourne - a slightly left-field organisation, across the Ringstrasse from the grander Vienna State Opera, importing its orchestra and chorus and specialising in short runs of immaculately prepared productions rather than night-after-night programming of old chestnuts. The two theatres are roughly the same size too, so Schwarz will have a strong sense of what works and what doesn’t in an auditorium of 1,200.

Despite his operatic heritage, Schwarz says he is no fan of blood-stained, knickers-off German radicalism and on the vexed subject of contemporary production style – recently in the headlines thanks to the Royal Opera House’s grisly and controversial production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor – he strikes a conciliatory note, emphasising that he can enjoy an intelligent ‘traditional’ staging as much as the stuffiest conservative.

“The audience has paid to be entertained, and I respect that – but entertainment can also include an educative element, can’t it? What I won’t have is anything that is offensively trashy for the sake of shock.” What matters in the theatre is “telling the story” he says, pointing to Barrie Kosky’s wonderfully daring yet historically sensitive animation of Handel’s Saul last summer as exemplary.

So what are his plans for Glyndebourne? For the next couple of seasons, he will be largely confined to executing the schedule laid out by David Pickard, and his own ideas won’t kick in fully until 2019. But he’s delighted by with what he has inherited, and in the 2017 season, he’s particularly excited about presenting the première of Brett Dean’s version of Hamlet, in a production directed by Neil Armfield which will subsequently tour the UK and abroad.

Further ahead an eyebrow-raising foray into American musical theatre is pencilled in, but you’ll have to keep guessing what it is. (“Nothing can be announced until we have cleared things with the composer’s estate and signed up the creative team,” is all Schwarz can say.)

But there’s no secret that in 2018 Madama Butterfly will also be staged for the first time in the Festival’s history, following its preliminary outing on this year’s autumn tour.

Born in East Germany in 1974, Schwarz has been “infatuated with everything English” since childhood, when he hung a map of  Britain above his bed – even though “in those days, there was no realistic hope of visiting the country”.  His teenage musical tastes extended no further than Erasure, and opera wasn’t on his horizon.

“In fact, if I heard it on the radio, I would switch stations. All that screeching and howling! It’s useful to remember that now: it means I can relate to people who still feel about it that way.”

But his strong bass-baritone voice led him into choirs, and a couple of singing lessons with an inspirational teacher opened the floodgates. After the Wall fell, opera became his passion, and he decided to train professionally.

Years on a learning curve in Moscow and Venice followed, and in 2002 he made his debut, singing Mozartian roles such as Papageno, until incurable acid reflux – a common affliction among singers – put paid to his performing ambitions and turned him towards administration.

Stints as a singers’ agent and office jobs at the Wexford Festival and the Hamburg Staatsoper followed, before he was appointed in 2006 to the Theater an der Wien. The result of all this peregrination is that he is impressively polyglot (six languages spoken with a fair degree of fluency) and blessed with a knowledge of the business from all its perspectives.

Schwarz has a strong personal bent towards baroque music – for the last seven years, he has run a prestigious vocal competition for singers in this repertory and he wants Glyndebourne to build on its reputation here.

“We should never tire of rediscovering Handel,” he says, confessing that his life was changed when he saw the video of Nicholas Hytner’s ENO production of Xerxes. “As a way of approaching these operas, it remains a masterpiece. I still watch it once a year.”

But his tastes are catholic, he says, and he would also like to explore the romantic French repertory and return to Janacek, following Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s magnificent interpretations of the 1990s.

As a bonne bouche, he’s toying with the charming notion of using Glyndebourne’s beautiful gardens as a backdrop for al fresco performances of pastoral divertissements – “perhaps in the interval, perhaps before a performance.”

One important challenge he faces is that of finding new directors with a real flair for the art form. He says vaguely that there are “quite a few people I am looking forward to introducing to the Glyndebourne public”, but the only name he specifies is that of the well-tried Robert Carsen (long familiar at Glyndebourne and hardly likely to set anyone’s pulses racing).

Schwarz has been visiting Glyndebourne regularly since 2009, and he’s also attended several performances at Covent Garden. But he acknowledges that as yet he has little sense of the British public’s attitude to opera or its broader place in the culture. A learning curve will be ahead of him here, and for all the similarities, there is one fundamental difference between the Theater an der Wien and Glyndebourne to which he must instantly adjust.

In Vienna, opera is cushioned by a high level of subsidy and tickets at the Theater an der Wien cost no more than £150 and as low as £12. Glyndebourne is fundamentally a commercial operation, with a top price of £300, very few seats below £50 and a reputation for glamour and "exclusivity". Will Schwarz feel comfortable in such an ambience?

For our interview, he jumped off his bike wearing scruffy torn jeans, but he assures me he has the necessary dinner jacket and “two sets of tails”, as well as the patience for the foyer hobnobbing that is such an essential part of the Glyndebourne game. In other words, yes, he is comfortable: never mind the inverted snobbery that labels opera “élitist”, he believes that Glyndebourne offers excellent value for “an extraordinary and wonderful experience that includes the gardens and the picnic and the dressing up”.

Box-office sales exceeding 95 per cent of capacity limit his room for manoeuvre, yet he is acutely aware of the need to extend the organisation’s reach, among the young, among local people who may feel it is not ‘for them’ and among the worldwide community of opera fans.

He clarifies the latter point. “Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t see busloads of Russians or Chinese coming in, but I do want everyone to know about the superb work we do. Glyndebourne is a legend, but there are so many misconceptions. When I got this job, I got letters of congratulation from people in the opera business who seemed to think I was going to live in Scotland!”

To put the record straight, Schwarz and his partner, the Czech tenor Ladislav Elgr and their much-loved dog Leo will actually be living on the South Downs of East Sussex, with their much-loved hound Leo. Out of hours Schwarz will pursue his endearing passion for apiary.

On the subject of the longer-term prognosis for opera, he expresses no doubt that for all the financial headaches, it is flourishing as an art form, with widespread interest in new work and audiences expanding via HD broadcasts as evidence of its health.

Under his guidance, Glyndebourne will pursue both, as well as continuing to provide what he calls “an opera museum – not a dead place, but somewhere in living engagement with the past that also looks to the future.”