Where I live, the must-have gift this Christmas was an unlikely one: opera tickets. For much of the autumn, opera was one of Denmark’s biggest topics of conversation. Even my culture-phobic in-laws seemed relieved that they had finally found a way to discuss my unusual career. ‘So what’s on at the opera at the moment?’ asked one of them at a Christmas lunch, genuinely interested.

There was a simple explanation. As the evenings drew in towards the end of 2024, Denmark’s public broadcaster DR aired the third series of its comedy-documentary The Opera Trip (‘Operarejsen’). The show proved a surprise hit when it first aired in 2022 and momentum gathered assuredly towards its heavily trailed third season.

I’m usually quick to find ways of criticising opera’s representation in the mainstream media. Yet I’m an ardent devotee of The Opera Trip. So is my partner, who usually glazes over a few seconds after I start droning on about opera. The show is more than wickedly entertaining TV. It is revelatory TV. With a nonchalant, breezy ease, it solves the perennial problem of how we present, introduce and discuss complex and esoteric art for a mainstream audience.

It does so by taking off the gloves – completely. Opera is treated as something as ridiculous as it is wondrous and essential. We see three men travelling to opera houses around the world, talking as freely and intriguingly about the aesthetics of music and theatre as they talk about urinating and passing wind, about their relationships, about their general confusion as to the jigsaw puzzle of life, work and creativity.

The Opera Trip as a mash-up of Top Gear, The Trip and the much-missed Four Goes to Glyndebourne (in one episode, in Series 2, the three do indeed go to Glyndebourne). Yes, it’s unashamedly male, alcohol-soaked and sometimes politically incorrect. But the potency and empathy of its insights are priceless in an age when we’ve apparently forgotten that opera is scintillating entertainment. Those insights begin in the pre-show pep talks, when comedian Frederik Cilius, the member of the trio who knows most about opera, initiates a discussion with his travel companions, actor Rasmus Bruun and composer Allan Gravgaard Madsen, about the opera they’re about to see.

During and after the performances come their reactions. The three pull no punches but balance cynicism with openness. They emerge in mocking giggles from a performance at the Arena in Verona. They strain their intellects to engage deeply with Tannhäuser at Bayreuth, having torn Wagner to shreds all the way through the museum at Wahnfried. The sight of the trio weeping, emotionally ragged, barely able to annunciate, at the end of such contrasting shows as Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence in Helsinki and Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore in San Francisco is wonderfully affirming. It flies in the face of the trendy fallacy that opera has little to say to modern folk about the world they’re in.

The dynamic of the three travellers makes The Opera Trip work. Here, they are themselves (almost): an uptight post-minimalist composer with a sense of impatience for the gilded opera scene; a non-musician actor whose nascent desire to immerse himself in opera has the urgency and passion of a love affair (he turns out to be a hardcore Wagnerian); and Cilius as the pivot between those two: a former professional clarinettist with a razor-sharp wit who uses the series to mischievously indulge the patrician and vulgar sides of his character.

When I first saw The Opera Trip, I was enthralled; I felt I’d waited my whole life to see opera talked about like this – not as some Open University lecture but as a real, personal, expletive-ridden discussion between people who have no interest in semaphoring knowledge but plenty of interest in the world around them. I long to talk about opera in this way. Perhaps I should resign myself to the fact that I’m probably too deep into the subject to be able to.

In October, in a Facebook posting, Madsen précised some of the many messages he had received from viewers who had booked opera tickets for the first time having seen the series. Among them were parents who reported their teenage kids urging them to put the show on. The Opera Trip – like opera itself – is apparently generationally indiscriminate.

Britain could do with a dose of The Opera Trip, not least as the tone of our national conversation about the art form so badly needs a reset. It would take minimal effort and cash for the BBC to buy The Opera Trip, subtitle it and put it on iPlayer. The effect on Britain’s ailing opera scene could be colossal. And that would be just the start. ON

@operalastnight

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Opera Now. Never miss an issue – subscribe today