“We are at a time of present crisis.” When Sarastro addressed his boardroom of business-suited acolytes last night, there can’t have been many in the Coliseum whose thoughts didn’t turn to English National Opera. Even by the standards of a company that has spent most of its history fighting for survival, 2015 was a year of unprecedented difficulty. Whether crisis becomes catastrophe remains to be seen, but there couldn’t be a more emphatic portent of success, a better-timed metaphor, than this Magic Flute.

"I wish I had money," exclaims the weak-willed hero of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and, hey presto, the devil appears to strike a deal. Auden and Kallman didn't have the last word on Faustian-pact librettos. Now writer Louise Welsh and composer Stuart MacRae, successful collaborators already on the award-winning Ghost Patrol, have had the bright idea of turning a fiendishly clever short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Bottle Imp, into an updated operatic subject.

Why have all attempts to make French comic opera funny to British audiences fallen so flat, at least since ENO's 1980s Orpheus in the Underworld? That company's La belle Hélène simply curled the toes, while Opera North managed to make a pig's-ear "special edition" of Chabrier's Le roi malgré lui. L'Étoile in its first staging at the Royal Opera fares better, not least because it's mostly performed in impeccable French, but does it ever reach the potentially hilarious pitch of Gilbert and Sullivan?

Unlike Schubert, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, Mozart composed nothing astoundingly individual before the age of 20. That leaves any odyssey through his oeuvre, year by year – this one will finish in 2041, by which time I’ll be nearly 80 if I live that long – with a problem effectively solved by Ian Page and his Classical Opera in placing works by contemporaries of various ages alongside young Amadeus’s efforts.

To say this latest revival of the Royal Opera’s Tosca peaks early would be an understatement. The shockwaves rippling out from the brass and timpani in the first few bars set the auditorium rumbling, tumbling the strings into motion. Conductor Emmanuel Villaume seizes his audience and refuses to let go, dragging us in to join the dance of the Sacristan’s sleekly self-satisfied music with its sacrilegious whiff of the Palm Court.

Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is a drama played out in shadow. Shine too bright, too unyielding a directorial light on it, and the delicate dramatic fabric – all unspokens and unspeakables – frays into air. Just over a year ago, director David Edwards and the Philharmonia Orchestra gave us a semi-staging of exquisitely allusive simplicity, leaving the music to fill the gaps between symbol and emotion.

How ironic that English National Opera turned out possibly the two best productions of the year after the Arts Council had done its grant-cutting worst, punishing the company simply, it seemed, for not being the irrationally preferred Royal Opera. And while 2015 has been as good as it gets artistically speaking for ENO, 2016 may well see confirmation of the first steps towards its dismantling by a short-sighted management – for what is a great opera house without a big chorus or a full roster of productions, both elements under threat?

Searing emotional truth has to be at the core of any attempt to stage Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes after Pushkin”. I was among the minority who thought Kasper Holten got it right, with deep knowledge of the original verse-novel, in his first production as Covent Garden’s Director of Opera back in February 2013. Then he had total commitment from Simon Keenlyside and Krasimira Stoyanova as an Onegin and Tatyana looking back in anguish on their youthful selves, and Pavol Breslik to the manner born as doomed, callow poet Lensky.

Dickens’s public readings from his novels were almost as famous and popular as the novels themselves. He would write special scripts that gave prominence to particular characters and that dramatized the salient events of each story; and of all these performances, A Christmas Carol was one of the favourites, his and his audiences’. So what better idea than to turn this unforgettable tale into an opera: an opera for a single singer, dramatizing the story, impersonating all the main characters, being, as it were, Dickens himself with added music?

You can forgive a certain amount of scepticism. After his now-infamous Royal Opera debut earlier this year, directing a Guillaume Tell that was heavy on concept and light on just about everything else, Damiano Michieletto returns for a Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci that sounded as though it might go the same way. In the flesh, however – and what work-calloused, life-blasted verismo flesh it is too – the production is thoughtful and instinctively theatrical – as good a new show from the company as we’ve seen all year.