We are sitting in the lobby of the National Theatre in the early afternoon waiting for the photocall for Dara to begin. Six or seven photographers, one woman, all dressed in jeans and dark jackets with large camera bags, some on wheels. There is not much conversation. As a relative newcomer I don't normally speak, but on this occasion I venture a remark.

“I have seen this play.”

After a pause one of the company says, “You're keen.”

I explain that I went to a preview. Another silence then, “In one sentence, what's it about?”

“It's about Sharia law.”

Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a constitution, and 114 since Peer first shone in the country's National Theatre, that elegant emblem of the Norwegian language. Where does this uniquely prosperous country stand today, spiritually speaking, and can Ibsen’s myth, creating as potent a figure as Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Juan or Faust, offer any answers?

Should you not have caught one of the 20^th century’s handful of greatest Wagnerian singers live - I did, just once, in a Prom of uneven excerpts - chances are that you first heard Birgit Nilsson in Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung on Sir Georg Solti’s Vienna Philharmonic Ring recording.

He was not only a bracing conductor/harpsichordist pioneer in period-instrument authenticity, writes David Nice, but also a gentleman and a scholar. My only direct acquaintance with Christopher Hogwood, who died earlier this week at the age of 73, was in two projects dear to his heart: the recording of Handel’s Orlando, mentioned by its countertenor star James Bowman below as a highlight of his career, and his phenomenally well researched Haydn symphonies series, both for that handsomely logo-ed early music branch of Decca known as L’Oiseau-Lyre.

If you only ever listened to opera from recordings, you might overlook the fact that it's as much theatre as it is music. In the opera house on the night, it's all well and good for the orchestra to play the score and the singers to sing their parts, but on top of that you have to allow for costume changes, move the scenery, adjust the lighting and make sure you get all the right people on and off stage at the appropriate moments. It's what makes opera the living, breathing, sometimes splendidly chaotic spectacle it is.

It’s raining. Not spitting or drizzling, properly raining, with clouds so thick that you know they’re here to stay. Yet rather than take shelter in restaurants and bars, or simply stay at home on this soggy summer night, 7,000 people in a stylish array of plastic macs and souwesters have made their way to the harbourside of the small Austrian town of Bregenz. Why? An annual festival that takes opera to extremes.

If, like me, your first reaction to the question “What does opera have to say to under-30s” is “What doesn’t opera have to say to them, or anyone, for that matter?” then you can stop reading now. Job done. Go out and spread the word. For everyone else – and that includes Tolstoy, Rousseau and Samuel Johnson, famous opera-detractors all – I have just one further question: what is your problem with opera?

I met one of the 20^th century’s most impressive, if not always sympathetic, conductors twice, on both occasions to talk Puccini before La Scala recordings of La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) and Manon Lescaut.

I felt so shocked by the events that took place during the premiere of Handel’s Ariodante on 3 July in the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence last week, and so disappointed that our painstaking work with director Richard Jones over the last six weeks had been so comprehensively ruined, that I felt I should document what happened.

La finta giardiniera is about seven characters in search of love. They are all pretending to some extent – they are not being truthful to themselves. It’s a classic Mozartian conceit which comes back in Così fan tutte in particular but also in Le nozze di Figaro – that, in order to love someone, you need to know yourself. Finta is about these seven characters coming to some level of understanding by the end, and therefore being able to love each other.