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The toughness of those comparatively stable times, however, has little to compare with the
turbulence of the last year which saw opera survive the pandemic – just. Our companies large and
small have coped with the Government’s stop-start policies on opening up and distancing, the
continuing uncertainty about Brexit travel rules, and the huge challenge of keeping afloat
financially. There have been great displays of ingenuity and inventiveness during the pandemic,
with the rapid building of outdoor venues, the extensive supply of digital streaming, and the
creation of new small-scale work.

Not everyone survived, alas: all deaths from Covid have been tragic, but the emblematic death for
the opera world was that of the director Graham Vick, whose work with the Birmingham Opera
Company did so much to integrate opera back into the community and prove its continuing
importance for our time. From Rameau to Stockhausen, from Fidelio to Lady Macbeth, he re-
created opera’s power with local forces in non-theatrical venues. He regularly administered
salutary shocks to the big houses where he had often worked, reminding them of their duty to
champion the new, and their imminent danger of losing touch with their audiences.

The big opera houses are burdened with huge overheads; they are trying to integrate adventure
and imagine how to draw in new audiences, while doing so with fixed forces and inflexible
arrangements. One of Vick’s pungent criticisms became prophetically true during Covid, which
was that it was far more possible for small companies to innovate and experiment. One positive
result of this traumatic period may be the emergence of small groups like Theatre of Sound (which
promises a re-imagined Bluebeard’s Castle in Soho this autumn). We have become more
accustomed to reduced orchestras, rescored classics, and simple stagings –and that has raised the
notion of flexible opera.

Nicholas Kenyon is the Telegraph's new opera critic CREDIT: Andrew Crowley

How fixed are operas? I’ve been pondering this as I thought about taking up this critical role and
chronicling the future of opera here. As in too many areas of music-making, opera tends to be in
the thrall of a fundamentally 19th-century view of the weighty, unchanging artwork that must be
respected. You have only to study how the singers of that era embellished and elaborated their
music and made it their own to realise how mistaken that view actually is. When Handel wrote
operas they did not remain fixed but changed with every cast of singers; when Mozart wrote opera
he was rather low down on the list of those credited and even he wrote new arias for new singers.