Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British, Alexandra Wilson,  Oxford University Press, £22.99

Maria Callas, la Divina of bel canto, appeared at Covent Garden only three times. At her 1952 debut in Norma, The Times praised her ‘tragic grandeur of a Medea’, while cautioning that her vocalism ‘pushes beyond the bounds of taste familiar to us here’. When she returned in 1958 for Tosca, the Observer noted her ‘burning passion’ and the ‘almost shocking exposure of feeling’, remarking that ‘such naked emotion is rare on our stage’. The mixture of British admiration and disquiet was revealing.

Opera in Britain has long been both admired and mistrusted, celebrated for its spectacle yet derided as foreign, extravagant, or out of step with national character. In Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British, Alexandra Wilson traces this paradox from the 1920s to the present, charting decade by decade how opera oscillated between popularity and suspicion, and how the charge of elitism hardened into a cliché with serious consequences for its survival. Her story is of an art once comfortably accommodated as entertainment for all, which, by the early 2020s, had come to be routinely portrayed as the preserve of the wealthy, the intelligentsia, and a vaguely imagined social clique.

The early chapters of Wilson’s book, running to the 1970s, are marked largely by enthusiasm. In the spirit of Victorian and Edwardian self-improvement, touring companies carried Verdi and Puccini to provincial towns, while the BBC brought opera into living rooms across the country. At the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells, Lilian Baylis ensured that clerks, shopworkers, and even schoolchildren could afford a ticket. Opera was woven into civic culture, not reserved for tiara-wearing duchesses.

From the 1980s to the early 2020s, opera flourished in performance even as its reputation declined. The Three Tenors filled stadiums, English National Opera’s ‘Powerhouse’ – directors such as David Pountney and David Alden, and conductor Mark Elder – gave London a radical edge, and Glyndebourne’s summer rituals retained their majesty. At the same time, press, politicians, and even some practitioners – the ever-willing and ever self-flagellating bien pensants – insisted that opera was irredeemably elitist. Wilson recounts how access schemes multiplied, with opera education departments sending workshops into schools and prisons. The paradox was stark: the more energy devoted to proving opera accessible, the more deeply the stereotype of exclusivity took hold. Eventually, opera came under attack from both sides of politics: occasional philistinism from the right (during the Thatcher governments), suspicion of ‘high culture’ from the left (in Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’).

By the 2010s the climate had darkened. Opera was drawn into the culture wars, accused of social irrelevance on the one hand and pressed on the other to display political ‘relevance’ (whatever this might mean). Brexit added its own complications. Funding cuts bit deep: ENO was ordered to move beyond London, Glyndebourne curtailed its touring, and even the Royal Opera House struggled. Wilson is unsparing in showing how decades of careless rhetoric made such choices possible. Once the word ‘elitist’ had stuck, it offered a convenient cover to politicians and managers alike.

The characters in Wilson’s book defy stereotype. It is ‘as much about the shop girl camping overnight in the queue for gallery tickets as it is about the jewelled duchess in the stalls’. The panorama is equally broad in its institutions: from the opulence of Glyndebourne to the working-class spirit of Sadler’s Wells, from regional companies to the ENO and Covent Garden. The story is peopled with political debates and subsidy battles, shifting attitudes and phlegmatic reviewers, dreaming intellectuals, divas, eccentric directors, and everyday figures.

The leitmotif of the book lies deeper than institutional fortunes. It is what Wilson calls the ‘opera problem’: a peculiarly British unease with the art form itself. Opera has become a stage on which questions of national identity and self-understanding are played out. The English have often distrusted its open display of passion and the fusion of intellect and emotion it demands. Class anxieties, a streak of anti-intellectualism, and a cultural reflex that prizes irony and understatement over ardour have all shaped this suspicion. Yet Wilson also shows the other side of the ambivalence: moments of genuine enthusiasm and wide support, when opera was welcomed as part of national culture. The relationship has been vexed, but not without its happier chapters.

Modern stagings have often compounded the problem, though Wilson touches on them only in passing. In recent decades directors have sought to ‘update’ classics with shock effects or concept-driven reinterpretations: Rigoletto recast as Batman’s Joker, Scarpia a Nazi. Too often the result breaks the natural bond between music, libretto, and stage action, alienating long-standing audiences without drawing in new ones and reinforcing the stereotype of opera as an artificially ‘highbrow’ entertainment. At worst, such productions suggest an art form embarrassed by itself rather than confident in its own language.

The book’s main argument points to a cultural loss of nerve. Where Baylis and the early BBC under Lord Reith treated opera as a gift to be shared without apology and to elevate taste, later generations seemed unable to speak of it except with defensive gestures. The result is a climate in which opera is endlessly apologised for, caricatured, or turned into a political football. The deeper lesson is bleak: no amount of apology satisfies detractors, who will demand even more until the object itself is undermined and destroyed – and not only in opera.

It is to Wilson’s credit that she recounts this troubled history with balance and insight, making a case that reaches beyond opera to the wider question of what kind of culture Britain wishes to sustain. Unless the cycle is broken and the earlier spirit restored – and Wilson offers concrete proposals in her concluding chapter – these isles risk confirming their reputation as a land without opera.