Philip Glass, who turned 70 in January this year, has his ears attuned to frequencies too high-pitched for most of us: he seeks to eavesdrop on what earlier ages thought of as heavenly harmony, and strains to hear the distant music of the spheres.

In his Fifth Symphony - an ecumenical meditation on human history from creation to resurrection, composed to mark the millennium - a chorus quotes a Hindi [...]

The Age of Reason needed outposts where irrationality could be studied and perhaps admired: the insane asylum was one, the opera house another. Eighteenth-century London had Bedlam in the City of London (designed by Robert Hooke), where socialites came to giggle at the gesticulating loonies. Back in the fashionable centre of town, the theatres for which George Frideric Handel composed his operas displayed the same crazily capricious behaviour. Prima donnas [...]

In the 1970s, as New York staggered towards bankruptcy, the Metropolitan Opera made a desperate plea to prospective ticket-buyers. "Strike a blow for civilisation," its advertisements begged. Only a few years earlier, a slum had been bulldozed to make way for the marble-clad theatres of Lincoln Centre, propped on a podium above the brawling streets; the surrounding area remained treacherous. This was opera bravely proclaiming its civilising mission in a [...]

The American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died last summer at the age of 52, had a light inside her. It flashed from her eyes whenever she walked on stage, and it brightened and warmed every word she sang in oratorios by Bach or operas by Handel, Rameau and Berlioz; it left you aglow long afterwards. She was a muse to her husband, the composer Peter Lieberson, whose last tribute [...]

Monteverdi invented music drama, and in Combattimento (Virgin) Emmanuelle Haïm, as conductor, daringly invites Rolando Villazón, the most fiercely histrionic of today's tenors, to experiment with songs that are often over-chastely declaimed. In a miniature epic describing the battle between the Crusader Tancredi and his disguised lover Clorinda, Villazón narrates the combat with desperate urgency, then settles into a commemoration of loss that is truly tragic.

Mozart: great pianists (Orfeo), [...]

Opera often borrows characters from myth - witches such as Medea, militant saviours such as Siegfried - but seldom creates archetypal figures of its own. The exception is Carmen. The wily gypsy of Georges Bizet's opera has come to symbolise eternal womanhood, at once alluring and alarming, a generative force and a barbed, emasculating harpy. She is Venus puffing on a home-made cigarette, or an Andalusian version of the goddess [...]

Is anything sadder than a satire that has outlived its usefulness, its bite blunted, its venom turned syrupy? That, for many people, is the problem with the operettas of W S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. In mythological travesties such as La Belle Héène, Offenbach exposed the licentiousness of France's Second Empire, and Strauss in Die Fledermaus laid bare the easy-going cynicism of imperial Vienna. One society frenetically can-cans to its [...]

Opera is a blood sport: its duets are duels, and high notes - especially those of the strutting, swaggering Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez - triumphantly announce a kill. Flórez justifies the revival of Rossini's long, odd Matilde di Shabran, in which the vocal skirmishes dramatise the age-old battle of the sexes. As the iron-hearted warrior Corradino, Flórez vents tirades of factitious fury and apoplectically bans women from his realm. [...]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a billion dollars must be in need of art. Culture is a product of surplus: diverting profits from their railways and mines, the Gug genheims, Fricks and Carnegies endowed America with art galleries and concert halls. Now, the oligarchs of eastern Europe, enriched by the monopolies they seized when the Soviet Union collapsed, seem determined to do the [...]

From Monteverdi's Nero to Verdi's Attila, opera has a long line of strutting, frothing, lethally ill-tempered tyrants. In principle, there's no reason why the succession shouldn't extend to include Muammar al-Gaddafi. His antics are innately operatic. He pours forth ideological harangues that are as crazily impassioned as arias, and cavorts across the desert in filmy garments with a choral troop of female bodyguards to keep him company. He is a [...]