I write this column at the end of the most intense week of opera I have experienced for a decade. In seven days, I saw three full-scale new productions from three opera companies in three opera houses. It started on the Monday with the Danish National Opera’s staging of Poul Schierbeck’s Fête galante – the first complete performance of this 1931 romantic farce for 65 years. It continued two days later with Peter Grimes at The Gothenburg Opera. And it wrapped up on the Sunday with the biggest, longest opera from a composer not known for his brevity: Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Royal Danish Opera.

Some readers may regularly put themselves through weeks like that and plenty of colleagues do. But it’s rare for me. I left London 10 years ago this year, partly as there was so much happening in the city that I felt it impossible to get an adequate critical overview. For the first time since then, I feel again the mixture of pleasure and pressure that comes with a big opera week – even more so, given I’ve learned (I hope) how to passably review a performance and am aware of the mental and aural legwork that comes with it.

It feels good. After a global pandemic that threatened the existence of live opera – and with tanks bearing various flags of convenience positioned on its lawn – it is gratifying to see the art form flourishing, on my patch at least. I will have seen more than half a dozen brand new operas by the end of the year. Most of the companies I cover are on their best form for a decade. The more I consider it, the more I think this positivity, while admittedly connected to those facts, is coming from inside me. I am more engaged with opera than I have been at any time since I was a teenager and have tried to think, over the last 18 months or so, why that is. Part of it is work: researching and writing programme essays for opera companies has forced me to get under the skin of operas I’d never fully appreciated before, and to see those I thought I knew differently. But I’m also more and more affected, psychologically, by the live presentation of this art form in a theatre full of other people. Die Meistersinger rammed that home. One of the work’s points, surely, is that we human beings need to live within a world of consoling illusions. Sometimes, those illusions can be overwhelmingly beautiful and deeply unsettling.

My resurgent, throttling enjoyment of live opera might be connected to the fear, during the pandemic, that the show was quite literally over. I think it’s also related to something more personal: that these days, I attend opera alone. During the pandemic, press tickets were limited to one. After that my partner and I had children. Nights out together simply don’t happen.

This solitude has improved my reviewing. It has also led me to think more deeply about what I’m seeing onstage – from a critical and interpretative perspective, sure, but also, more importantly, when considering the bigger question of what a staged opera is saying to me and my fellow theatregoers about life in the 21st century. Alone, I feel the dramatic power of opera hits me even harder. Sometimes that can lead to a heightened emotional state that isn’t necessarily helpful – a state I recognise from when I started to experience opera in London in my twenties. If there’s nobody to ask you what you want to drink during the interval of Peter Grimes, you can easily slip into a mental vortex that can start to obscure your critical faculties and your appreciation of what’s happening technically and artistically. That particular opera gets under the skin like few others; its dramatic power is emblematic of what opera, at its most powerful and empathetic, can do. At my desk now, a week later, phrases from it are still circling in my head, dredging up all sorts of curious thoughts and feelings. What all this means, I think, is that I’m getting from opera what I’m meant to get from it. And consider, for a moment, what that says about opera’s evolving power. We keep setting this whole unlikely apparatus up, imaginative composers keep finding musical means of telling stories, good directors keep reminding us how relevant those stories are.

I have written before, that we opera-types can sometimes become so deeply embroiled in the art-form that we stop seeing the artistic wood for the trees. But right now, in a week like this, I am simply floored, humbled and stupefied by opera’s power and the vision of those who deliver it, week-inweek-out. ON