1910–1911

With the big decision to produce The Magic Flute, opera became the focus and unifying element of Dent's life, this amateur Cambridge production only the first skirmish in his lifelong battle for opera in Britain. Producing an opera to his exacting standards would be a statement of defiance to the musical establishment, and in choosing Mozart's last opera, Dent was being even more radical in his approach. He knew that for an ambitious scholar to take what appeared to be such a massive diversion from his scholarly pursuits might appear academic suicide, especially when he ought to have been working on his doctorate. Colleagues like Edward Naylor were highly critical of the whole enterprise. But Dent was deliberately taking a course very different from the usual routes, and far more important in the long run than another Hellas would have been. In his teaching, increasingly in his writing, and now through performance and production, Dent was finding a working vehicle for his high standards of scholarship.

In 1910 ‘most of Mozart's operas were almost completely unknown in this country’; Mozart was somewhat in the shadow of late nineteenth-century opera, while The Magic Flute was generally held in low esteem. Although The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni were well established in the repertory – usually in heavily compromised versions – Mozart's other operas were largely ignored. Dent wanted to give Mozart and The Magic Flute a leg up into the twentieth century. ‘Idomeneo had never been performed here at all; Die Entführung had been revived by Sir Thomas Beecham for a few performances in 1910’, Cosi fan tutte had one performance in English in 1890, La clemenza di Tito abandoned after 1840 as being hopelessly old-fashioned.