Following my recent suggestions about Valletta and the solution for the former opera house site I feel I should explain why the site can only make sense as an auditorium and not as a theatre, nor an opera house nor, horror of horrors, a multipurpose confection that will be neither fish not fowl.

The culture of opera is in its death throes

After so many years of involvement at the Manoel Theatre, decades of reviewing musical events and being directly involved in the production of opera, besides the baroque festival, Maltafest and Mużikafest and what have you, I can say that the facilities ideally required to stage opera are such that the footprint of the opera house would have to be doubled.

Let me try to tackle the queries one by one. An opera house, whether a Barry repro or a Piano creation, simply is an impossibility to run. The Manoel Theatre can just about stage one production per season as opera is horrendously expensive to produce.

Opera incorporates so many artistic disciplines: hence its name. Singers, extras, sometimes dancers too, orchestra and chorus, costumes, sets, repetiteurs, producers, directors, set builders and costumiers, light men and choreographers, you name it and you have it.

If all I have available is the Manoel Theatre which, try as one might, will always remain a 1732 court theatre, I would love to concentrate on just the operas of the baroque period. However, till this long-suffering theatre remains the uncrowned national theatre, it will have to offer the public a varied fare including drama, dance, chamber and orchestral music, recitals, panto and musicals, which all have to fit in a short season between October and May.

When you think that an operatic production requires at least two weeks of rehearsal at the theatre to get one’s set and costumes ready, putting on more than one production in a programme like the one that is expected of us by the public is impossible.

Not unless the entire Manoel set-up were geared to operatic productions and only that and, even so, unless each and every production is 70 per cent sold overseas the theatre might merely break even.

Sadly, despite the Barry nostalgia, there simply isn’t the following to make a full operatic season a viable option. Yes it is ironic. Despite the hundreds if not thousands of letters sent to this newspaper for as long as I can remember about the Barry ruins, having full houses in a tiny theatre like the Manoel would be impossible if we had to depend solely on local audiences. I fear that, locally, the culture of opera is in its death throes despite there being a humongous increase in following overseas. Contemporary composers like Glass, Andreissen and Ades are all happily composing opera.

This waning of interest is understandable when one thinks that, for decades, all we have had was an opera from each of the Gozitan band clubs and one annual production from the Manoel; now two if one counts the opera within the January baroque festival.

I am pleased to say that both the festival and the March opera have elicited a very encouraging response but it is simply not enough to sustain ongoing back-to-back opera.

Another consideration is that opera varies enormously. How can one compare the forces required to stage Verdi’s Don Carlo with those set for Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito? They are chalk and cheese.

For many opera buffs, opera is all about Verdi, Puccini, some Rossini, some Donizetti and a Carmen and a Cav & Pag thrown in for good measure. We could add Mozart’s da Ponte operas perhaps and there we stop.

Most of Verdi and Puccini’s operas are literally too big to be staged at the Manoel and, today, we are used to seeing these leviathans being performed in their full glory with those wonderful direct transmissions from the Met and Covent Garden. Therefore, the expectations are justifiably high.

The average opera buff expects the same standards of excellence and, at the Manoel, this will only be realisable if operatic productions are commensurate with its size; hence, the Manoel’s choice of Mozart’s Clemenza for next March.

The other suggestion – a multipurpose building on the site of the Barry opera house – would merely create a slightly larger Manoel Theatre with all its inherent problems.

We would be exacerbating a similar situation in which the Manoel has been enslaved for decades, simply because there is no backstage to speak of, which is why, from the very beginning, I have relentlessly advocated the Piano design for Parma, as discussed on Bondì Plus with Bernard Plattner, as an auditorium for orchestra.

The Malta Philharmonic has nowhere to perform apart from the Manoel, which is too small for it, making mockeries out of Brahms and Mahler scores let alone Sibelius and Tchaikovsky ones. This is why, after 18 years of nomadic existence, the MPO desperately needs a home and that home should be an auditorium on the Barry site incorporating the ruins. If this is not done, the MPO can be downsized and rehoused as an integral part of the Manoel or it can pack up.

About opera; were we not such a pyrotechnically insane race, we could have a Bregenz type opera in Grand Harbour, which would bring opera lovers from all over the world, or perhaps on Manoel Island.

Outdoor opera is an industry mainly aimed and sustained by the tourist industry because they usually incorporate an inimitable historic site like the Arena di Verona or the Terme di Caracalla.

We could have had Norma at Ħaġar Qim but with those protective tents the place looks more like a horizontal Flying Dutchman than a Druidical temple!

As for building an opera house that can have productions like Nabucco, Rosenkavalier, Parsifal and Turandot on a seasonal back-to-back basis we are talking of an area double the size of St John’s Co-Cathedral.