A sadly common feature of human beings is our ability to take something great and reduce it to something tawdry. Think of the wonder of air travel and our typical experience of airports. Think of the incomparable sacrifice of the Catholic Mass and the tawdry and commonplace ways in which it is all too often celebrated.
When it comes to the arts, opera-goers have for years had to suffer “demythologising” accounts of heroic figures – making them wonder why they are paying high prices to see the elevated brought down to size while mockery is made of the very beliefs which explain the motivations and emotions of the characters they have come to see.
