You just have to look at opera audiences these days.

Well, it's pretty much what opera audiences have hardened themselves to.

And opera audiences are the most devoted to the classics.

In what other culture would an opera audience allow itself to be locked in (literally) to a performance?

It must have been like one of those nightmares where you find yourself in costume before an opera audience.

But pleasing demanding Milanese opera audiences was a job for professionals.

Whatever they do, it seems, the picture of the opera audience is fixed in the public mind: white, wealthy, ageing.

Oratorios became the main choice of music during that period for opera audiences.

Some of these roles are extremely popular with opera audiences.

On the one hand is the demonstrated antipathy of opera audiences for new works.