The state of opera today (it’s not good)

I’ve been hoping that in this, the last of my weekly columns on opera, I would be able to strike a positive, even cheerful note on the present and future of the art form, but honesty compels me to say that I don’t think it is in very good shape. Not, probably, that it has ever been, or at least only for brief periods. Owing to its mongrel nature, there has usually been a tendency for one or other of its ingredients to lord it over the others, so that the ideal balance of music and drama, spectacle and action, personalised in the collaboration of singers and conductors, stage directors and musicians, has only been rarely achieved.

It is, of course, an inherently expensive art form, too, originally designed to celebrate the splendours of rulers and aristocrats, so that now, when it is unlikely that any rulers will want to attend one, stagings are often evidently economical, or, when lavish, largely financed by people who can’t afford to go to them, and almost certainly wouldn’t want to if they could.