The success of the Glyndebourne model, eighty years old this season, says something revealing about opera and the British Isles – that opera, here, is definitely not for all.

There was a time when efforts were made to popularise it. In the days of the Carl Rosa Opera Company between 1875 and 1960, many more provincial towns in Britain were provided with an intermittent diet of opera than is the case now. My first opera in 1947 was a Carl Rosa Carmen in Southsea. (This was the company for which the founder of Glyndebourne John Christie’s wife Audrey Mildmay sang in the late 1920s.) The example of Germany, whence came as refugees – in 1934 and after – many of the talents that laid Glyndebourne’s professional artistic foundations (Fritz Busch, Rudolf Bing, Jani Strasser), demonstrates that opera can be mass culture. Christie wanted to bring that example to bear on the Etonian sector to which he belonged. Yet in Britain there’s nothing demotic about the way we have come to idealise Glyndebourne, seeing it as somehow appropriate as well as superior. When I was schizophrenically working for both The Guardian and Vogue, how could I resist getting so many chances to luxuriate in the Glyndebourne experience? But if one really loves opera, one wishes it much more widely shared. And opera here, it seems, cannot shake off association with country house picnics on sunny lawns wearing dinner jackets and dresses: nostalgia on the hoof. Eating on such a grand scale also confirms that opera is grande luxe. The artform is most readily digestible for Brits when the performance is merely part of a bigger picture – the masterpiece at the core of the event somehow upstaged by the social occasion, the difficulty of driving there, the food, the wine, the ineffable flavour of privilege.

Sir Brian McMaster, boss of the Edinburgh International Festival for fifteen years after successfully making Welsh National Opera an internationally recognised company, jested soon after the hugely expanded reconstructed Royal Opera House Covent Garden re-opened in 2002 that it was really just a swish restaurant with a theatre attached. But he’s right. The front of house is run by caterers. Corporate entertainment is the biggest factor.

Imitators of Glyndebourne now include Garsington Opera at the Getty country residence at Wormsley beyond High Wycombe, and Grange Park Opera at Northington Grange (the foremost example, according to English Heritage, of the Greek Revival style in England which was vandalised by its aristocratic Baring owner and only saved by public outcry). Opera-goers needing restaurant style eat in the ruined interior. When Garsington Opera used to be at Garsington Manor, the restaurant in the Barn was lined with washed oak panelling salvaged from the old opera house at Glyndebourne. Grange Park (tickets £30-£180) and Garsington (£102-£180) are a lot more expensive than Holland Park Opera in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (£15-£75) – which also welcomes picnicking and has a more comfortable fully catered option.

It is revealing how much opera in Britain gets no public subsidy. Glyndebourne gave seventy-seven performances of six works. Grange Park and Garsington had twenty-five performances each (of three works). Longborough in the West Country did thirteen performances, Iford twenty. Holland Park with thirty-nine performances of five operas is Britain’s only municipal opera, getting around £500,000 from local ratepayers. The northern spa town Buxton’s festival did fifteen opera performances, on £140,732 subsidy towards a budget of £1.4m. Summer opera with supper and no taxpayers’ money totalled an impressive 160 opera performances. That compares with 222 performances by Opera North, the Welsh National, and Scottish Opera. So opera upstaged by food is a significant part of our unaffordable culture. With a standing pass, Pret à Manger sandwich and ginger beer you might do Glyndebourne for £40. But most seats there cost £145 up. If you eat in the rebuilt modernised Middle and Over Wallop restaurant, your visit to Glyndebourne could set you back almost £500 per head. Covent Garden is cheaper.

How do such sky-high prices affect reception of the work? Does the investment guarantee top quality? Would it be cheaper and better to fly to Germany or Italy to indulge your secret extravagance? Summer opera companies have to manipulate the press – for if they failed to sell most seats they would soon not exist as institutions. Punters who invest so much in their pleasure have a strong motive to enjoy themselves come what may. That probably explains why opera here has to be the upstageable part of such an odd luxury experience.

Glyndebourne 2014 on paper looked very promising: Richard Jones staging Der Rosenkavalier, after his Handel Rodelinda at ENO was such a wonderful return to form; Tom Cairns tackling Traviata; and young Frederick Wake-Walker let loose on Mozart’s early La finta giardiniera on its first outing at the Sussex festival. But none of these new productions did that much for me. Jones’s Rosenkavalier had its notorious coup de théâtre – tastefully lit so we could see Kate Royal’s handsome Marschallin stark naked taking a shower in the middle of the stage (as you might following a romp with Tara Erraught’s rather frumpy-looking Oktavian, whom I had seen in Munich as Sesto in Clemenza di Tito a few months earlier). But like other design novelties in his reading, little of what Jones made of this wonderful Strauss and Hoffmannsthal comedy was particularly à propos. For instance, turning the Marschallin’s little black page boy Mohammed, who sweetly brings in coffee for the two lovers in the first scene, into a gangling adolescent valet (Daniel Francis-Swaby) who appears moonstruck romantic and desperately in love with the Marschallin may amuse the audience and make us wonder what is going on. But just what does it say about the location, the society, the relationships? The minutiae of careless comic updating seemed to rate more with Jones than making the emotional links between the characters add up so one could believe what they were singing about.

If the Marschallin is so young and lovely that even a loopy black valet can barely keep his fingers off her, why does she sing such a ravishing number about getting old and losing her charms later in the act? With surtitles we all know what is being said, and even novices to the opera can quickly get the hang of what’s going on. So when Jones seems to be trying to tell a different story it’s frustrating.

Of course at Glyndebourne the playing and singing and acting are professional and appealing. What was missing in Rosenkavalier was well-directed emotionally true characterisation, and in charge of the orchestra Robin Ticciati seemed to be exploring the piece for himself rather than enabling it to reveal its secrets. Equally some of the casting seemed distinctly undercooked. In the old days Glyndebourne had a whole roster of artists to take the smaller roles whom Glyndebourne’s management knew and trusted. This continuing sense of ensemble lasted from year to year. In Rosenkavalier Gwynne Howell, a veteran from ENO and Covent Garden, was model as the Notary – perhaps even the best long-suffering put-upon lawyer I can remember in the piece. Naturally Jones’s staging was going to follow a totally different path from the last production here, designed by Erté. We got all sorts of little special details: Jones is a great director. But there was not much to love, for those who know their Rosenkavalier and all its brilliantly prepared jokes, visionary touches and hyper-sensitivity.

At the heart of the opera are two issues which need very careful handling: the vulgarity and excessive display in Sophie’s father Faninal’s establishment, and the coarseness of the somewhat preposterous Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau, cousin to the Feldmarschallin. The plot concerns an arranged marriage between a blue-blooded slightly older man and a fresh young nouveau riche girl. He is a lecher with a habit of getting his way below stairs. But the betrothal ceremony is all glorified window-dressing. The Feldmarschallin’s young lover (not Mohammed, incidentally, but Oktavian – the star role for mezzo-soprano en travesti) is central to the ceremony. Oktavian presents Sophie with the silver rose as proxy for Ochs. Jones made one feel the whole silver rose charade was rather tiresome – and his designer Paul Steinberg relocated it to what looked like an art deco cinema foyer, with so few extras on hand it felt quite draughty. The idea was perhaps that the Faninal establishment demonstrated better taste than Baron Ochs. Lars Woldt as Ochs had shown up in act one not as a man with a lecherous compulsion who enjoyed life and did not see why he should ever be denied any food, wine or sex he fancied, but as a kind of Billy Bunter in lederhosen: eccentrically absurd, ponderous not dangerous, and vocally forgettable too. Designer Steinberg’s first and third acts were both severely cramped. Both the Marschallin’s bedroom, shower-room and ante-chamber, as it miraculously just about managed to be, and the dubious café where Ochs faced his come-uppance dallying with the Marschallin’s pretty little maid Mariandel (as Oktavian had to pretend to be when Ochs broke in on the Marschallin’s early morning coffee uninvited), thereby forfeiting the fat wallet he planned to marry, were each minimally illustrated. Awkward furniture movements became the futile choreography of this unlovely affectionless show, which felt more and more ice-cold and charmless as the effortful evening wore on. No slurping in the cafe: Ochs’s soup and most of the comic fun and games were cut.

Of course the season’s new productions were clever stuff, but each in its way seemed to misfire somewhat. Wake-Walker’s Finta Giardiniera was all about design and hyper-frenetic self-consciously baroque gesturing. The premise of the story, a beloved who in his sleep attempts to kill his adored who then disguises herself for safety and runs away, was acted out in the overture. But the whole cast seemed to be more involved in the games they had been made to play by Wake-Walker (who cut and edited the piece without helping it) than in the feelings and relationships they were meant to be experiencing and setting before us. The impostor gardening girl of the title is genuinely in love – in fact this is one of those love tangles and intrigues that litter the baroque theatre and opera, and need some serious directorial help sorting out. But Glyndebourne’s cast and director (and Ticciati conducting) were mostly very inexperienced – and it showed. There was freshness and there was energy, but too little coherence, too much artifice. This first of Mozart’s Italian operas to be translated into German – during his lifetime – scored a real popular success for him and remained an occasional fixture in the German repertoire. It is no masterpiece, but it has characteristic qualities. It also was well performed twenty-five years ago by Opera North and WNO, proving it can be brought alive. Glyndebourne’s staging looked good, set in period costumes and a sort of baroque hall. The final woodland backdrop was memorable. But Wake-Walker showed little confidence in how the plot had to run its course. Christiane Karg in the title role was disengaged, and as her lover Count Belfiore Joel Prieto (a good voice) seemed equally at sea, For sentimental comedy like this to work, the narrative has to be taken seriously enough to be credible.