Tom Sutcliffe

Tom Sutcliffe (born 4 June 1943) is an English opera critic, author and journalist. He was also until 2015 a lay member of the General Synod of the Church of England, first elected for the Diocese of Southwark in 1990. From 2002 until 2011 he was a member of the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England.

Early life Sutcliffe was born in Norwich, and saw his first opera, at the age of 4, at the Kings Theatre, Southsea. He was a boy chorister at Chichester Cathedral, and became head chorister there in 1955, near the end of the period during which Horace Hawkins was Organist and Master of the Choristers. He was educated with a choral scholarship at Hurstpierpoint College and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a tenor choral scholar and studied English literature.

He contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera and has also written for the programme books of San Francisco Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Welsh National Opera, Garsington Opera, Grange Park Opera, the Aldeburgh Festival, Opera Holland Park, La Monnaie, the Edinburgh Festival, Opera Australia, Frankfurt Opera, the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, and the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. His appearances on television have included a 1991 film about Benjamin Britten in the BBC's J'Accuse series. In 1994 he took an important part in Lindsay Anderson's last film, an autobiographical documentary titled Is That All There Is?. He has twice been elected to a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship, and from 1999 to 2009 chaired the Music section of The Critics' Circle, of which he is president until the end of 2012. In 2007 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Rose Bruford College. He worked as a dramaturg in collaboration with opera director Keith Warner at the Monnaie in Brussels in 1998 and at the Theater an der Wien in 2003 and 2006. He currently writes for Opera Now and Opernwelt.

Personal life Sutcliffe is married to the author, playwright and librettist Meredith Oakes. They have a daughter Chloe Sutcliffe now working in the Research department of the RHS Gardens, Wisley and a son, Walter Sutcliffe, who is an opera and theatre director. and currently Intendant of Oper Halle in Handel's birth-town in Saxony-Anhalt.

Publications Believing in Opera (Faber and Faber, 1996). The Faber Book of Opera (Faber and Faber, 2000).