Or I will be telling wide-eyed young children on Christmas morning that there is no such thing as Santa.

Relevance to who? may well be the question-for those to whom it is relevant, it is extremely relevant for others, it is as relevant as needlepoint.įor the debate, I am surrounded by believers on the panel and believers in the audience, and I am worried that if I bring with me the full dynamics of my wariness about the current state of opera-as an evolving art form, if not a business, an epic token of civic pride, or a backdrop for architecture and morality-I will be more or less strolling into a church during Sunday service and shouting at the top of my voice that God does not exist. Opera is one of those words that contains so much historical and symbolic weight and prejudice that you have to clamber through dense, thorny tangles before you even get to what it might actually be, and if there is anything really left, other than it being a segregated leisure pursuit for the entitled.įirst of all, on my Glyndebourne day, a trip to the world-famous annual opera festival in a fine, unhurried part of England, which is part work, part dream, part detour into how the other half, well, 1 percent live, I take part in a live mid-morning Radio 3 debate on the program Music Matters about the relevance of opera. Nothing changes, including the desire to change. We’re fifty years after aesthetic autocrat Pierre Boulez proposed that the correct response to the perceived ossification of opera was to “blow the opera houses up,” but then he didn’t quite mean that, only that he too, with his usual irreverence, was trying to work out what to do with it, how to modernize it, keeping the usual repertoire, but developing new ways to present new forms. Expensive, stuffy, kitsch, snobby, bloated, fancy. The problem with the word “opera” is that even if you have never seen or heard one-and in fact have only come across it through the tatty realm of Simon Cowell and his camp, rich-man’s fascination with its sensual glamour and mystique-you will have a very definite opinion about what it is, and why it is not for you. Debate: does opera matter? What is the future for opera? Still there?

Tell me why the old songs never die