In plain English: British philanthropist Peter Moores spends millions of dollars to support performances and recordings of operas in his own language.

It doesn't take much to get Peter Moores going on the subject of opera in English. "Take Lucia di Lammermoor," he says. "You're used to listening to it in Italian, you know it by heart in Italian, and you have no fucking idea what the woman is singing about! You hear it in English, and you find out she's actually saying something!"

The British arts patron has the courage of his convictions. Over the past thirty years, the Peter Moores Foundation has sponsored an unprecedented series of recordings of opera in English, first on EMI, now on Chandns. The Opera in English series has included dozens of opera titles in the vernacular, ranging from repertory staples such as Aida, Boheme and Butterfly to rarities such as Donizetti's Maria Stuarda (billed as Mary Stuart) and Janacek's Osud (Fate). When we met, late in 2002, Moores was scouting a rare 1510 Tilman Riemenschneider sculpture at Sotheby's, which he hoped to nab for Compton Verney, a mansion-turned-museum that he founded in 1993, outside of Oxford. And he had a special cause for excitement, which he couldn't yet share--when the Queen's New Year's Honours List was announced at the end of the year, it emerged that he was due for a knighthood.

The honor is a fitting cap to a lifetime of arts support. Through his foundation, Moores has given away 57 million [pounds sterling]--the equivalent of $90 million--to the arts. The family fortune stems from the Littlewoods, a pari-mutuel football pool; Moores's father, John, the son and grandson of bricklayers, started the company and eventually became one of the richest men in England. Peter himself ran Littlewoods for a while, but now he spends most of his time overseeing his foundation, funding fine-arts projects such as Compton Verney, as well as musical endeavors. Still, opera holds a special place in his heart. Aside from the Opera in English series, Moores has fostered the careers of young artists ranging from Joan Sutherland and Colin Davis to Jane Eaglen and Rebecca Evans, sponsored opera productions throughout England and underwritten Opera Rara's excursions into the byways of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian repertory.

Moores's love of opera began early, inspired by listening to Caruso, Farrar and Gigli recordings from his father's well-stocked record cabinet. When he started attending opera, in the early postwar years, most performances in England were in the vernacular. "There's this widely used translation of Boheme, where Rodolfo sings 'Your little hand is frozen,' Moores says. "As far as I'm concerned, that's what the aria is called!"

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