Deriding Donizetti

Someone should write an opera about a once-great opera company, now in artistically suicidal decline. A few decades ago it had great productions and performances of the masterpieces of the repertoire, but it has been scared by successive governments warning about élitism, the need for attracting new, young, opera-hating audiences, and so on. So it has hired a succession of ‘directors’ (adopting the language of cinema), who have never seen an opera, to stage established works and mount new ones, making them look as much as possible like the eternally running musicals it eyes enviously.

It makes sure to invite for first nights a large number of media people, who are amazed at how little what they see resembles anything in the plots they read in the programme, and realise that, far from being inaccessible, opera is a multimedia affair in which you can more or less ignore the music if you want to.