British opera impresario who founded Longborough Festival Opera in Gloucestershire. He died on April 21st 2025, aged 83.
Graham started his working life as a builder's mate. Before leaving school he had set up a concrete-mixing business. At 21 he bought half an orchard in the village of Longborough, on which he built his own house. He later became a property developer in the smarter parts of London and trained as a barrister, acquiring expertise in planning law.
Graham had no formal musical training. As a boy he befriended a village character called Jack, a tall old man who would go through the streets gesticulating and singing, and who introduced him to Haydn, Mozart and Schubert from an enormous record collection. As a bricklayer he would listen to Puccini as he worked. An aged neighbour shared her enthusiasm for hymns, sparking a lasting love of Anglican church music; he persuaded the Lay Clerks of Gloucester Cathedral to sing regular Compline on Friday nights in the Gloucester service station on the M5.
His Wagner obsession came later, from watching BBC broadcasts of Patrice Chéreau's "Ring" from Bayreuth. His wife Lizzie fell under the spell first, then he did.
Graham converted a 150-foot chicken shed and cow barn in his back garden into an opera house, flamboyantly pink and white, with terracotta statues of Wagner, Mozart and Verdi on its pediment. The orchestra pit was mostly hidden under the stage, as at Bayreuth's Festspielhaus, wise in a house seating only 500 with about 70 players in the pit.
In the late 1990s audiences still sat on benches and straw bales. In 2013, Wagner's 200th anniversary, the LFO was the only company in Britain to stage the full 16-hour "Ring" cycle, to critical delight. The "Ring" cost roughly £1.2m to put on. Graham took not a penny of public money and the LFO had no reserves.
His daughter Polly Graham took over as artistic director in 2018.
If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?