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For those who see life as a deliberate challenge, a competition against the expected, and an opportunity to discover within yourself qualities you perhaps never believed possible of a human let alone yourself, opera must be one of your passion.

In reality great art should be one of your passions, but whatever other media are imposed upon you in this regard, opera should be at the foreground.

Of course variety and freedom of will are the prerogative of liberal society but if you would allow me to impose myself upon you my first order would be to recommend, forcefully, that you elucidate yourself and your children in this area.

Until tonight I believed that opera was a dying art form. Call me pessimistic but I have never held popular opinion in the highest esteem. This is not a class-prejudice comment. The elitist masses in democratic Athens unanimously voted for war in Syracuse and look where that got them. The masses area not interested in opera; at least not in a non-bastardised form. When I say this I evoke indignant retorts: it is snobbish to preserve something that is exclusively enjoyed and if something is not liked by people then it is both not good art and not worth preserving. To churlishly counter, S&M clubs are exclusively enjoyed but would hardly be considered snobbish.

To properly counter, indignation at the existence of anything you do not understand merely illustrates your own insecurity about your inability to conform to something and apprehend its academically valid intellectual value. I do not really have an academic understanding of the fashion industry, but to dismiss is as something that could not either reach academic heights or not send a quasi-metaphysical spasm of orgiastic pleasure down the spine of another owing to its artistic beauty would be to betray my own naivety and fear of ignorance.

Subjectively opera is the most valid expression of human self-understanding. It represents truths about human existence which other media do not and can add a layer of metaphysical release to which even the written word can only aspire.

Tonight I watched one of the greatest tenors to have lived breathe out the last breaths of a character, Simon Boccanegra, on stage. His body fell limp and lifeless to the floor. The audience wept. This man, Placido Domingo, is fighting cancer. He will not perform for much longer and most of us there tonight might never see him again. He lay dead well beyond the end of the opera. He lay dead until the conductor, Antonion Pappano, started to look very concerned. The applause waned as the audience began to doubt the joke. And then, and only then, the great man leapt up. Seventy if he is a day. There were tears in the eyes of all. We had seen something great this night. We applauded for twenty minutes. I was tired. I had been awake for two days. But you can sleep when you are dead. I would rather die young than live a life without opera, a life without great art, a life in which people do not try to excavate the very foundations of the human soul.