And I agree with him. I see opera as the supreme art form, not so much a representation of human life as a redemption of it. For dramatic music can rescue our feelings from their randomness, and vindicate our immortal longings in the face of chaos and decay.

The complaint was already made in Monteverdi's Venice that singing detracts from the realism of the stage. The verismo of Verdi was a response to this complaint, an attempt to tie the melodic moment to the particular person in a believable situation — and no one can doubt his success in this. But Wagner had another and more persuasive response to those who dismissed his operas as mere fairytales. By lifting everything — character, setting, emotion and gesture — into the imagined space of music, he believed, we achieve another and higher kind of realism. Words and music develop together, and the purpose of both is drama. Opera conceived as a sequence of arias, loosely joined by recitative, thereafter disappeared. Even Italian composers quietly adopted the Wagnerian ideal, so that by the time of Puccini it was universally accepted that operas should be through-composed, each act working towards its climax by largely musical means, with the musical material constantly reworked in accordance with the logic of the drama.

In recent times, therefore, Wagnerians like Berg and anti-Wagnerians like Britten have both been Wagnerians in practice. Through opera human life can move from situation to situation by purely musical means, with the same necessity that compels the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach or the quartets of Beethoven. The music then lifts the drama into another realm, where passion achieves a wordless logic of its own, and the ephemeral and contingent is remade as eternal and necessary. By revealing the eternal in the transient opera reveals the truth of our condition. If Oliver Rudland's instinct is right, opera can do this even with the fleeting recollections of a drowning man.

The redemptive mission assumed by the successors of Wagner is one reason why operas are now so often mutilated. Despite the cost of production, and in a sense because of it, producers take what could be called "liberties" with the stage directions, were mutilation felt to be a liberty and not a necessity. Producers are chosen for their "artistic" qualities, and the mark of the artist is to "challenge" whatever assumptions lie to hand. Enjoying a budget far beyond anything required by the usually simple actions on the operatic stage, and faced with an audience of middle-class people condemned to suffer in silence as their expectations are thwarted and their fairy landscapes ruined, producers cannot resist the temptation to spit on the precious thing that has been placed in their hands.

Sacred things are especially intolerable to those who no longer believe in them. An urge to desecrate is the inevitable successor to a lost habit of reverence. Hence Siegfried is dressed in schoolboy uniform, Mélisande is lying on a hospital bed in sheltered accommodation, Rusalka is taking a bath in a whorehouse, and — well you know how it goes. The best one can hope for in the state-subsidised opera houses of today is that the singers will all be dressed in Nazi uniform, but otherwise allowed to get on with the plot.