I learned the sad news of the death of Lord Harewood on Monday evening in a short address from the stage before the curtain rose on Buxton Festival’s first performance of Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon. During a lifetime devoted to opera, The Queen’s cousin had made a valuable contribution to Buxton as to so many places — festival director between 1993 and 1998, a long-term artistic advisor and later its president.

Michael Williams, the chairman of the opera house, invited us to spend a moment or two in silent memory of this “great man”. He said: “I know he would he hoping you would enjoy tonight’s performance. Mignon was an opera we used to talk about putting on. But we didn’t have the resources in those days.”

Harewood is indelibly associated with my own years as an opera enthusiast. A battered copy of the first edition of his update of Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book — price 45 shillings in 1954 — has remained for me an invaluable guide to what is shortly to be seen, or as an aid to a more complete understanding of what has already been seen.

It has proved useful in charting changing tastes in opera. The essay on Mignon, for instance, penned by Gustave Kobbé himself, says “the opera is beginning to lose its hold on the repertory . . . with a story that is, perhaps, too ingenious to appeal to the sophisticated audience of the modern opera house”. Ingenious — now there’s a tactful adjective for a plot most consider utterly absurd.

Harewood might easily have chosen the idle life of an aristocrat, lazing amid the comforts of Harewood House, near Leeds. This is a property I have never visited. Three hours before learning of its owner’s death, though, I was revelling in the glories of the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth House, parts of which are the work of Harewood’s architect, John Carr.

He also built for the 5th Duke the Crescent in Buxton which from the 1780s became the place to stay for discerning visitors in town to take the waters. This magnificent building, sadly empty for some years, is the subject of an ambitious new spa development project by Trevor Osborne, the man responsible for the successful renovation of Oxford Castle.

I look forward in years to come to staying there. In the meantime, my nights in the town are comfortably passed in a property built by — I think I should more accurately say for — a later duke. From my bedroom over the weekend I looked across the lovely Pavilion Gardens laid out in 1872. The many fine dogs being walked there gladdened the heart of a canine enthusiast such as I.

So did my reacquaintance with a group of greyhounds in town again collecting for a rescue charity. Were they there every week? I asked one of the owners. No, once a year. They’d booked the same day after success last year on the first weekend of the festival. We opera fans are suckers for dogs as for divas.