My mother provided the funds and I bought a thirteen and ninepenny ticket for "Der Rosenkavalier". The seat looked excellent on the plan but it was in reality so far to the side that I could only see a few square feet of stage on the O.P. side - if I stood up. And whenever I stood up my seat squeaked. Bruno Walter would generally conduct only the first performance of each opera and then hand over to Robert Heger whom I found a trifle on the dull side. The cast, however, was scintillating: Gitta Alpar as Sophie, Delia Reinhardt as Octavian, Elisabeth Ohms and the Marschallin and the inimitable Richard Mayr as Baron Ochs. The Royal Opera Orchestra would consist of the cream of the profession collected just for the season - the first horn was Aubrey Brain, to my mind an even better musician than his famous son, and Walter Lear was the bass clarinet. This was to be the first or many arduous visits to the Opera House, arriving at 5.30 or 6 a.m. and paying a shilling for a stool on which one remained for hours on end, passing the time by making friends with others in the queue. I can now only remember one elderly couple, devout Wagnerians who had christened their only son Siegfried and were determined that he should be a great tenor - but I met him some while later and he was a fiddle player. In the end I became a subscriber which entitled me to an Amphitheatre seat once a week on a Monday. The seats were always rather at the side but it was a great deal better than the gallery, not to mention the hours on the stool and I felt that I was going up in the world. << less