It was predictably unreconstructed stuff.”Get off, you wife beater,” came a lone dissenting female voice but she was swiftly drowned out by the unmistakable cry of “Get On Hup!” as the opening bars began to the mighty “Sex Machine”.. If ever a band ought to have been prepared for playing the Main Stage at Glastonbury it was Muse. The West Country outfit (hailing from Exeter) have been coming to the festival since they were teenagers. By late afternoon yesterday, the Glastonbury festival was wet enough for swimming with the fishes It was time for the godfather. But if you bring in some grandee at the top who has never lived through a production period… Before I came to this interview, I had 40 minutes to make five absolutely crucial decisions, like a general on the battlefield.” At which point her pager rings, and she goes off to command her troops.’The Miserly Knight’ and ‘Gianni Schicchi’, Glyndebourne (01273 813813), from Thursday to 23 August.

“It’s gone, and I don’t really understand how it happened.” The rot began, I suggest, with Nicholas Payne and Paul Daniels stepping outside their managerial and musical roles, and directing Il Trovatore. Whereupon Arden sighs: “I feel bad, because they’d asked me to direct that.”She couldn’t, because she was committed to directing a play by her husband, Stephen Jefferies. “But there are opera directors stalking the earth, looking for jobs. How can you expect to run a huge organisation like that, and do a show? Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn found it pretty hard at the National.”Which brings her to the crux: “The people who really know how to run opera houses are the people who do the work – the production staff and stage management.

Each actor would know where everybody else was.” This was the group that – as their chairman Roger Graef once pointed out – was not so much a theatre company as a state of mind.In Arden’s view, the average opera company’s state of mind is far from where it should be. There are no real ensembles any more, and singers assume that their main job is to make a beautiful sound, with movement a mere add-on. “Opera singers need all the skills an actor has, plus other, more subtle skills – it’s a far more difficult job,” she argues. “They need constantly to make this connection between what’s happening in the music, and what’s happening in the drama They never get a chance to develop this skill. If you haven’t learned to move on stage by the time you’re 25, you’re finished.”And for this woman, whose first training was with avant-gardists in Paris, movement is the key to everything. “Est-ce que c’est vivant? Is it alive? That’s why I don’t mind working with an opera singer who is 35 stone and almost completely still – but the way he will look at something, or move his head or hands, or get up off a chair – is it alive? That’s the only question.”But opera’s biggest problem is, in this week’s vogue-word, systemic, Arden says, with the Gubbay d?cle nowhere near the top of the list: that dubious honour is reserved for ENO, whose artistic dissolution is, in her view, tragic.