This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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zionism is racism. Men are rapists. Opera is elitist. Set aside the first two fallacies for another day. The third has been latterly empowered, ending the careers of young artists and jeopardising the art form’s survival. 

Consider the prosecution case: Opera is expensive. Its tickets are priced so high they are reserved for the rich who, having forked out, like to dress up. Nights at the opera, seen though a glass darkly, project an ugly exclusivity.

Opera is usually sung in a foreign language. Although translation titles are projected above the stage, looking up and down all the time gives you an inferiority complex and a crick in the neck. The interval refreshments are Veuve Cliquot and smoked salmon.

Opera lasts twice as long as football. Seats are covered in velvet but the leg- room is strictly Easyjet. Uncomfortable? Nowhere more so than Bayreuth, where they won’t let you out for two hours on end to satisfy a call of nature (I hear some patrons wear catheters). 

Shows start before the working day ends. Festival operas kick off mid-afternoon. Opera resists innocent enthusiasm. Woe betide the newbie who jumps up to film an aria on an iPhone.

the vast majority of operas seen today are ancient. The two big crowd-pleasers are Carmen (1875) and The Marriage of Figaro (1786). Some think the art died with Puccini in 1924. Others say that’s just Italian opera; modern opera lives on, here and there. But where? And for how long?

Two United States companies, Maryland and Miami, shut down this season. The industry monthly, Opera News, was also scrapped. An anti-opera tendency in UK politics led to English National Opera being booted up north. 

Arts Council England (ACE) also slashed Welsh National Opera and stopped Glyndebourne from touring. There is no arguing with ACE, which has adopted anti-elitism as dogma. (Elitism, by the way, is defined as a belief that society should be run by the rich and well-educated.)

In a bid to revitalise, New York’s Metropolitan Opera is dumping grand old Aida next season for new operas on Moby Dick, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Spanish poet Lorca. Its first work by an African-American composer, Fire Shut up in My Bones, slightly improved the image. 

German houses, meanwhile, are dressing up old operas as new. Frankfurt reconceived Tannhäuser as a frustrated homosexual while Munich fast-forwarded Tosca to the 1970s with a line of naked male prisoners on stage. 

None of these shifts, however, have softened the prejudice that opera is elitist. Opera is now next in line for those who glue their hands to a wall in support of gender choice, saving whales and Palestine. No voice in authority dares to speak up for opera. Let The Critic, therefore, make the defence case.

Here goes.

a medium-budget movie costs $15 to $20 million to make. The money is raised from private and public subsidy and no one minds that most of it goes down the drain because movies cannot, in the public mind, be elitist since tickets cost less than a t-shirt, and you can go to the cinema in trainers. 

By way of benefit to society, though, opera yields far more than movies. An opera employs hundreds of people, many from deprived backgrounds. The last music director of Covent Garden used to go scrubbing floors before school with his mother. A famed soprano spent her college years cleaning toilets. 

One recent Royal Opera chairman was a refugee from Hitler, another helped his Dad sell fruit and veg in the old Covent Garden market. Opera is, always was, for and of the people.

I hear from singers who, blighted by cuts, retrained in other jobs. One is a heating engineer, another works in a care home. They still dream of stage roles, but they do not deprecate humbler jobs. They know that opera exists in the real world.

Opera has lessons for all. When the foster mother drowns Jenufa’s baby in Janacek’s harrowing opera, the audience impact is so extreme you can barely hear the cellos for the sobbing. 

The moral torments of Peter Grimes speak far beyond the claustrophobia of a Suffolk fishing village. In Warsaw last month they put on three extra nights of Britten’s opera, such was its urgency to those who live in the shadow of war. Glyndebourne, running at 99 per cent capacity, is adding more shows. 

opera, done well, has never been so popular, and populist besides. Country-house venues now offer £30 tickets to under-30s. Standing room in Vienna costs ten euros. Compare that to the Glastonbury rockfest where admission sets you back £355. Taylor Swift tickets start at £500. Who’s elitist here?

The American rapper Jay-Z has an estimated worth of $2 billion. Which opera diva accounts for two million? In rock, the star is king. In opera everyone, from intern to Bryn Terfel, is aware that the show stands or falls by total collaboration. 

One country-house producer puts on operas in jails. I have heard prisoners say that opera allowed them, for the first time in their lives, to trust in others, a sensation that made them feel miraculously free.

Which is not to say that all is well in opera. Bad boards appoint bad CEOs who wreck established companies like ENO and WNO. Singers can be haughty, musicians obstructive. But opera is anything but a rich man’s plaything and society will suffer broadly if anti-elitism succeeds in reducing the art to an occasional treat. Opera has the power to redeem lives. 

We need to jump on a table — as Carmen does — and win the argument for the proliferation of opera, before it is crushed by the mob.