Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

As for the Messiah, it is, like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, one of those rare works that appeal immediately to everyone, and yet is indisputably a masterp…

What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation - a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are peop…

I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the read…