Now we all know “success” is not the same thing as “worth,” and one opera is not better than another just because you’re ready to re-hear it sooner. But still. There is a body of operatic work that people want to experience repeatedly, want to live with over time, want to receive from different interpreters as they come and go, and this body of work does not come from all periods equally. Any way you parse these numbers, they tell us one thing very clearly: Opera did not have a slow, gradual decline. Something quite sudden happened to it around 1930. Maybe there is a factor here other than the audience conservatism lazy critics love to bash?

I think there were two somethings. The first is easy to pinpoint: talking movies. Want to be transported out of daily life for a few hours, told a story, moved or amused, entertained and impressed by costume, action, music, scenery? You’re in the market for a Gesamtkunstwerk, and here it is. The central place of opera in cultural life — the Big Show, the source of iconic classics everyone can discuss with everyone else, the trade whose top practitioners are called “stars” — cinema took that away, and took it fast.

The second something is more complicated, and more than a little tragic. It had been building for a while, ever since Edison invented sound recording, and it broke through at around the same time as the arrival of the talkies, with new electrically produced recordings and the radio to broadcast them. These media gave sudden market access to musicians who had previously been confined to localized and low-paying sectors of the artistic economy. People who could not necessarily read and write European musical notation, who may not have had much to do with the associated traditions, who didn’t belong to the social or ethnic groups at home in a box at the opera, could now propagate their music directly on shellac. They could connect (with each other and with audiences) beyond their immediate geographical ambience. They could experiment, share, explore, develop, and earn.

That’s all good. The tragic thing is the way opera and European “classical” music generally recoiled in terror from the new development. Not everyone — but enough to create a chasm. To read the commentary of “serious” music writers on the emergence of ragtime, jazz, blues, swing, and rock is to be stunned by the recurrent expression of class-based, racial, and sexual anxiety — anxiety is the nicest way to put it. Music for the educated — for the literate, the well-mannered, the high-minded — ran away from “pop” as fast as it could. Melody, rhyme, symmetrical rhythms — those mainstays of Handel, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini — were dropped by the road in a panic, and left for Tin Pan Alley and its successors to pick up and enjoy as exclusive property.

If opera had welcomed the new music, it might have survived. That wouldn’t have been impossible; Neapolitan and Russian folksong, plus various versions of “Gypsy” and “Oriental” music, had caught the ears of certain composers at certain times, and opera benefited enormously from the infusion of new blood. But the blunt market force of pop was like nothing European music had met before. Cultural appropriation was now flowing in the other direction, and the former masters were flummoxed. (What is “Tin Pan Alley” anyway? Some say it means lousy upright pianos banging out tunes with a “tinny” sound. It could also mean a low-rent district whose inhabitants aren’t civilized enough to purchase copper or cast-iron cookware. Either way: elite condescension repurposed to signal where fun can be had.)