My 2015-2016 opera season began last week at a performance of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Otello. We’ll have a review up later by staff writer Nick Gallagher; the bottom line is that entire audience was swept away by the cast’s vocal pyrotechnics and the sheer power of Verdi’s music united with Shakespeare’s plot. Rarely does a Met audience rise for a standing ovation the minute the curtain falls; that happened the night we saw Otello, and the powerful emotions unleashed by the story moved more than one listener to tears.

One of our longstanding goals here at The American Interest is to do a better job of covering culture, and opera, the art form that brings instrumental music, the human voice, acting, dance (many operas have ballets in them), and design together, is one of our priorities. Opera has had a bad rap in the Anglo-Saxon world. Many Hanoverian and Victorian critics in Britain sniffily dismissed it as Italian emotionalism without the kind of moral tone and rational grounding in realistic theater that critics from Addison on thought should be part of the artistic experience.

There was some truth to that in the way that opera was received in much of the English speaking world. Very few Brits or Americans actually bothered to study foreign languages, and without any understanding of the libretto, opera wasn’t exactly an intellectual pastime for many of those who filled the concert halls to hear it performed. At least until Wagner got his hands on it, opera was more like the pop music of the 19th century than its jazz. Serious People often thought about it the way they think about Broadway musicals today—there were a few good works in the old repertory, perhaps, but silly Disney movie makeovers developed for the mass out-of-town tourist audience are not the best respected art form around.

Meanwhile, virtually every 19th-century novelist who wrote about opera performances stressed the degree to which the audiences were more interested in seeing, being seen, and carrying on love affairs than in paying attention to anything happening on the stage. Opera was the classic place where rich Philistines came to bask boorishly in music they neither understood nor respected.

In 20th-century America, opera had something else going against it: As a “light” musical form that dealt heavily in emotionalism and spectacle, opera was something that women and gay men were passionate about—and that straight men were supposed to despise. The banker was supposed to snore through the opera that his social climbing wife forced him to attend; gay men, meanwhile, swooned over divas and worshipped at the shrine of Maria Callas. The one exception to the rule that straight men were anti-opera was for the true upper class elite, like Eustace Tilley and a handful of his peers. Loving opera was a sign of an aristocratic background and European tastes.

That’s a lot of baggage for an art form to carry, and it does great credit to the Met and the other American opera houses that opera has, if not exactly flourished, at least established a firm foothold in the United States. Today, American opera is at a crossroads. The audience is aging (although there are some young faces to be seen at the Met these days); the cost of putting the “grand” in grand opera is becoming astronomical; and the entire genre of serious music to which opera belongs seems increasingly less engaging to a new generation growing up in schools and colleges where western cultural history is less and less a focus of instruction or concern.

On the other hand, there are new opportunities as well. The widespread adoption of supertitles (or, in the Met’s case, those wonderfully inconspicuous back of the seat panels that discreetly flash the libretto in English translation), has changed the relationship of the audience to the drama. More than ever before in its history, opera today is a dramatic performance; audiences chortle, weep, and gasp in response to events on the stage, and singers are under more pressure than ever before to act convincingly. At the same time, the dramatic improvements in sound and video recording quality mean that high-definition broadcast and recorded versions of great opera performances can be enjoyed at a reasonable price by people all over the country. Beyond that, the increasing affluence of American society means that more people have the leisure to cultivate pursuits like the opera—and the income to support the art of their choice.

So opera is becoming the kind of “rational entertainment” that Joseph Addison wanted it to be; enjoying it is no longer limited to the rich or to the geographically lucky. The world has never been as full of great singers and inspired instrumentalists as it is today; the level of technical training has never been higher. Not just at the Met, where performance standards have hit an otherworldly level of near-perfection, but even at less lavishly funded opera houses all over the world, the repertory today is routinely performed by better artists to more inspired direction in better halls than opera ever knew in its golden age.

All the conditions for a new golden age seem to be present, and in many ways we are in a golden age of opera performance, but there is nothing like a golden age of operatic appreciation among the people at large, nor is there anything like a golden age of new operatic compositions that will give the golden oldies like Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, and Puccini a run for the money in the century to come.

As we review performances and productions and write about the state of opera here at The American Interest, we are going to try to keep our eyes on the prize. We want to make the case for “classic opera” and convince readers that learning to appreciate opera is a vital part of a liberal education and an invaluable part of the good life. We also want to do what we can to encourage new work that holds promise, and see if our criticism in some small way can’t do what criticism really ought to be about: assisting and supporting the artists who seek to enrich human civilization with sublime new work that illuminates the human heart, rattles the cage of the human condition, and glimpses eternal truths and lasting values in the passions and struggles of both the great and the small in the lives of their times.