After Handel introduced Italian opera to London, Georgians and Victorians went to performances to wear their diamonds and meet friends. As Victoria’s reign progressed, opera percolated down, via brass bands, organ grinders, music hall warblers and whistling delivery boys. In 1869, the Leeds impresario Carl Rosa set up ‘a sort of operatic Woolworths’, a touring company putting on shows in cinemas and working men’s clubs

Lilian Baylis was the other great populariser. In 1897, she took over her aunt’s music hall, the Old Vic, and threw herself into social improvement: ‘My people must have the best. God tells me the best is grand opera.’ With 2,000 seats priced between 3d and 3/- , her operas were so popular that they subsidised her Shakespeare plays. Meanwhile, Covent Garden was running a brief, expensive international season with foreign stars singing in whatever language they had learned the role. It must have been hilarious.

Wagner was thought lowbrow –easy for the herd to understand through his use of leitmotifs

High and low coexisted peacefully until 1930, when Philip Snowden, the chancellor of the exchequer, indulged his opera-mad wife by proposing a public subsidy. Cue chauvinism: public money should not be used for ‘boosting the purposes of........

© The Spectator