 With David Rigby, who provided the business input, they spent three years planning the first Festival while restoration was underway.The restored Buxton Opera House became the venue for the first Buxton Festival in 1979 with presentations of "Lucia di Lammermoor" (in its first ever complete performance in Britain), followed by Peter Maxwell Davies' "The Two Fiddlers".From these first successes, the Festival has made a significant impact on the operatic culture of Britain with new productions of rarely performed operas (such as Britten's "Let's Make an Opera" (1980); Domenico Cimarosa's "Il matrimonio segreto" (1981 and 1993); Kodály's "Háry János" (in its British stage premiere in 1982); Vivaldi's "Griselda" (1983, but not seen anywhere since its original Venice presentation in 1735); Cherubini's Médée (1984, in its original French dialogue never seen in Britain); and, from 1986, many productions of Handel's operas, as well as many others by Cimarosa (in 1989 it presented three).