When it comes to generating column inches in the national press, opera has a better time of things than most other departments of classical music. It’s visual, so there’s a picture to be had; it’s narrative, so there’s a story to be told; and it’s sexier than your average string quartet – especially if there is a vague possibility of the cast taking their clothes off . Hence outrageous marketing deceits like the one that Covent Garden perpetrated earlier this season, with a photoshoot of Renée Fleming artfully encircled by a writhing mass of semi-naked men: a scene I failed to notice in any of the shows it was promoting.
That said, opera remains a relatively hard sell. And we all know why: the foreign languages, the long sit, the expense of tickets, the perception of high culture as beyond the reach of ordinary, Brexit-voting folk… familiar issues every one. Yet how I am sick of hearing them, because they’re founded in objections that can mostly be addressed (though the objectors rarely want to know).
The biggest problem for a critic on a newspaper is that so much about the world of serious music needs explaining, in a way that perhaps it didn’t 40 years ago. There was a time when you could make assumptions about what a broadly educated reader knew. You didn’t have to underline the fact that Mozart was an Austrian composer of the 18th century. You didn’t have to tell your readers that the heroine of Tosca meets a sticky end. These days, increasingly, you do. If you doubt me, just watch an episode of University Challenge and be horrified as sharp, sophisticated Oxbridge types fail to identify the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.