The snobbery and sweaty brows of watching opera in the cinema

I remain puzzled that, so far as I know, no daily or weekly paper carries reviews of the New York Met opera relays (I’m not a denizen of the blogosphere, where they may well swarm). To judge from the number of cinemas that show these live relays, and from how crowded most of them are, clearly more people see opera in this form than in any other. And many of those people will be experiencing opera live for the first time in cinemas, and may well never go to an opera house. I suspect there is a strong element of snobbery involved on the part of non-reviewers, as if one hasn’t really been to a performance unless one was actually in the theatre where it was taking place. Opera buffs tend to be eager to hear, ‘in the flesh’, whether a particular singer’s voice is getting stronger or weaker, what the balance is like between the singers and the orchestra, and so on, and certainly those things need attendance at the theatre.