But is it any good?

Writing to his friend and fellow-author William Dean Howells in 1907 about the Prefaces to the New York edition of his novels, Henry James said, ‘They are, in general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantile lines — as against the so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart.’

Happily for him, he wasn’t at all interested in music, or specifically in opera, otherwise his heart might have broken a long time before it did. For there isn’t much writing about opera which even pretends to be criticism, if that means a disciplined account of the nature and achievement of individual operas, in the light of a first-hand response to them, and of a general view of what opera, as opposed to other art-forms, is capable of achieving, and what are its limitations.