Opera is in a state of crisis, and it’s not just opera professionals who are feeling it. If you’re an operagoer in Bristol, Liverpool, Milton Keynes or Norwich, for the first time in decades you no longer have any full-scale opera to attend.

There’s a reason for that: rash, destabilising and arguably prejudiced decisions from the Arts Councils of England and Wales. When I started out in the business, the Arts Council (as it was known) was administering a programme called ‘stabilisation’: an acknowledgement that the one thing arts organisations needed in order to create art was to know, long term, where they stood financially. These days, the quango employs the opposite approach, sitting atop its throne like a stomach churning composite of Simon Cowell and the Emperor Nero, deciding which organisations will live or die based on arbitrary and contradictory parameters.

All this has helped fast-track the opera world’s long-overdue process of soul searching. Old injustices are being put right. There’s no doubting opera needs to address its feudal power structures and that it needs a greater variety of voices – in every sense. Sometimes, opera companies have demonstrably failed in their duty to repay public investment by filling seats (apparently, given the recent sell-out of Welsh National Opera’s Death in Venice, an issue of marketing more than taste).

In May, an article in The Stage titled ‘Opera in crisis’ gathered some figures around a table to discuss what’s going wrong. They produced quite the list: misogynistic opera critics (a point I and others must reflect on), sexual harassment in theatres, a lack of racial diversity and the difficulty the industry presents to disabled performers. Most significantly, Bill Bankes-Jones, an opera professional with more vision than most, spoke of the problem of an opera audience ‘drawn to stories of women being tormented by men’. He lamented an unwillingness to stage new works. When you boil it down, opera’s problems are society’s problems, but with a bit more cultural baggage and the added dimension that soon, only the privately educated will know about opera, have the necessary skills to perform it or be able to afford to watch it.

The issue of ‘the repertoire’ is more troubling, and sees companies and audiences stuck between a rock and a hard place. Plenty in positions of power are hell-bent on the fallacy that only newly-written and ethnically specific work is relevant – a belief that contradicts everything we know about art and empathy from Shakespeare to The Shawshank Redemption to Macy Gray. Meanwhile, when opera companies persuade newcomers to spend their hard-earned cash on an evening of opera, they find those audiences want to see operas like Carmen, La traviata and Tosca.

So it’s not just established audiences that are drawn to stories of ‘women being tormented by men,’ but new ones too. Hang on, though, aren’t those operas, in part at least, stories with a strong feminist perspective pivoting on heroines who rail against the patriarchy?

Surely it’s time we all looked with a little less ingrained prejudice at the stories operas tell. Most have survived because generations of directors can see that they speak to every successive generation. We need to renew the repertoire and we need more operas that broaden the cultural experience. But new work is a nightmare to sell, one reason so many opera companies have commissioned operas based on well known films in the hope they prove more marketable.

But it’s one thing getting bums on seats and another getting them back a second time. Given the refraction of musical language combined with the constancy of operatic technique, it has become extraordinarily difficult to write a new, large-scale opera that will satisfy the ears and be theatrically engaging.

I will always argue for more interesting programming, even if I’m convinced the solution is in a three-way balance between established, new and neglected works. But when it comes to opera virgins, I don’t see the problem in mobilising the likes of Figaro and Tosca. New audiences want to see them, and new generations of directors will always be able to show how relevant their stories are to the vast majority of people.

Whatever we do as an opera community, we can’t be hoodwinked into the lazy assumption that the stories the opera repertoire tells aren’t relevant. I struggle to think of a repertoire opera from Don Giovanni to Nixon in China that doesn’t have a clear and resonant connection to the universal experience of any active member of a society in the western world. And the more excellence is put to work in bringing these pieces to life, the more relevant they will seem.