It also doesn’t have to be an affection shared by everyone in the target demographic. I love the music of La gioconda, Wozzeck, Radamisto and H.M.S. Pinafore, but I’m OK working in a community with people who might not share those particular attachments, and who might have their own attachments to operas that leave me cold (Les Troyens, Die tote Stadt, Il matrimonio segreto). We get along on our ample common ground – the long list of operas almost all of us love — and we are understanding of each other’s divergent further affections.

And these affections aren’t limited to theatrically strong operas. This is an important and difficult point. Opera is music as drama and drama as music; all operas are conceived on some version of this ideal; the best are those that come closest to attaining it. But if they fall short, it makes a difference how. A love-worthy score attached to a drama that is weak (Pearlfishers) or ill-proportioned (Guillaume Tell), or even repulsive (for me, Turandot) can survive. A knockout drama attached to a score nobody hungers to re-hear – well, one can’t even name examples, because those operas go nowhere. To give it my best shot: I found Muhly’s Two Boys theatrically compelling, and enjoyed the suspense and pacing of the show, but cannot recall any moment of thinking the music made it better than it would have been if performed as a straight play, or filmed with speaking actors and a decently atmospheric score in the background.

The experience of being able to return to a score and find it newly moving, newly fascinating, newly delightful, newly rewarding of immersion and surrender – that, for music-lovers and musicians, becomes both a need and its satisfaction. Music is not something you hear for the sake of hearing it once. You hear things once in search of things you will want to hear again. I think most people in the general population feel this way about their favorite songs, which are often the ones that became meaningful to them during the emotional quests of youth. What those songs give them, they want to receive ongoingly; they want them as life-companions. The more your life is touched by music, the more you feel that way about whole albums, musicals, symphonies, operas, song-cycles – and the more of them you hope to find.

All of us thus touched discover our own lists. One opera that came along in my lifetime, Nixon in China, is on mine. A few more from after the circa-1930 crisis are there too; deep love for Peter Grimes and Dialogues of the Carmelites will not surprise anyone. Others still give me at least the stirrings of potential feeling that I can hope might yet blossom. But it’s slim pickings.

I ask in all seriousness whether there are people who love any opera of Harbison, Adès, Picker, Corigliano, Sallinen, Henze, Stockhausen, Saariaho, Larsen, Rautavaara, Berio, Dun, Weisgall, Reimann, Zimmerman, Muhly, or Rihm in that renewable, long-to-hear-it-again way. I hope the answer is “yes,” but I fear it is “not many.” To all theatrical scores I’ve heard by the composers just named, I admit I prefer Jesus Christ Superstar. It has immediately attractive yet unpredictable and non-generic melodies. It has a match of musical character to dramatic intent. It has narrative energy. A fresh encounter floods the mind with memory of past encounters, yet the work does not seem a closed book. Casablanca is a closed book: great film, fun to watch again every few years even when one knows it practically by heart, but it is what it is. Operas become what they are only when delivered by interpreters. In the case of Jesus Christ Superstar, we may still be waiting for a truly satisfactory live-theater interpretation. But I have no trouble being sure that the piece is worth one, or being ready to spend for tickets whenever there might be a chance of its arrival. (You can say what you want about Lloyd Webber’s later fall-off of inspiration, but let’s not be hypocritical here: that happened also to Gounod, Mascagni, Massenet, Humperdinck, Britten, and Richard Strauss. It doesn’t diminish their successes.)