Article: A fight at the opera. (British opera attendance)

THE English National Opera's new advertising slogan--"Everyone Needs Opera"--is hard to swallow. Only 3% of the population are regular opera-goers, according to a survey from Travel and Tourism Research. That leaves 55m people who are unaware of their basic needs.

Many look to the success of Puccini's "Nessun Dorma" as the World Cup theme tune, or to the adulation of Luciano Pavarotti, and infer that opera is becoming a populist art-form. But their reasoning, unlike the tenor himself, is thin. Yes, there has been a surge in the number of people who own opera recordings--1.7m more than before the World Cup. Opera attendance, however, is static and the clientele has ...

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