A well-known expression, derived from American sports reporting, has it that the opera ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings. The fat lady to whom this referred was the bun-loving Valkyrie who rounds off Wagner’s Ring Cycle with a toe-tapping aria prior to throwing herself — or at least shifting herself by whichever means of propulsion she could physically manage — onto Siegfried’s funeral pyre. There’s a slight variation of the cliche on the opening night of La Traviata at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow. The show was almost over because the old lady collapsed.

It’s something of a big deal, this production, which is appropriate because everything with opera — the casts, the tunes, the mittel-European thigh-slapping and couch-lounging — is big and bulky and hasn’t seen its feet in years. Most pertinently, it marks the return to the home stage of David McVicar, the Glasgow-born, globe-straddling operatic wunder-direktor. In populist terms, it’s Ewan McGregor doing The Partick Thistle Story at the Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow. Opera buffs heard the news and hit high C.

Understandable, then, that the excitement should imperil the fortitude of one of our frailer culture-lovers. From the dress circle one barely registered the crisis; there was merely a slight raising of the footlights just as Violetta, the flighty courtesan of 19th century

Paris, was being told she will never be accepted by society. Down in the stalls, however, it was action stations as the ushers struggled to move the stricken dame to a spot where the numinous beauty and orchestral intensity were slightly less overwhelming, just by the Strawberry Mivvi stand, I’d guess.

“There are two golden rules when an audience member faints,” sighs the assistant director David Morrison. “It’s always in the middle of an act and they’re always sitting in the middle of the row.”

I chuckle and tut with the complicity of the hardened opera-goer but, really, in this instance, Morrison’s a Japanese astrophysicist explaining constellation density to a sea-lion. None of this will ever quite compute. Opera, for me, resembles what Dracula must experience when Van Helsing squirts the holy water on him. It’s beyond pain, it’s a kind of existential inversion of everything that’s good and true, namely our century of vivid and vital populism.

It’s starting-handle culture, in a sense, opera: stuff that was appropriate and useful at a distant point in history but was then superseded by more egalitarian and efficient versions, such as the stage musical and the concert performance. The entire genre was founded upon a supposition anyway — it was an academic exercise, created by Renaissance composers who believed, without much conclusive evidence either way, that the drama of the classical Greeks was sung rather than spoken.

Sitting in the dress circle next to me, though, are the actress Jane Asher and her cartoonist husband Gerald Scarfe. The former was once engaged to Paul McCartney, the latter designed the sleeve of Pink Floyd’s The Wall album; now this is what I call proper culture: “What am I making of the show?” muses Scarfe. “Well, I thought we were going to the bar a minute ago but it turned out not to be an interval after all, it was just a scene change, so we had to sit down again.” He sounds a little grumpy. Asher is in town to film a BBC Scotland sit-com: “I’m a huge McVicar fan, so I simply had to see this,” she says.

Peter Easton, the former Radio Scotland disc jockey, is here too, as are composers Craig Armstrong, who scored the Hollywood adaptation of La Traviata, Moulin Rouge, and James Macmillan. Also here are the Blue Nile vocalist Paul Buchanan, actress Daniela Nardini and the lady who played Edie McCreadie on Balamory. Easton is happy to admit that La Traviata is a considerable distance from Simple Minds and drivetime traffic checks: “Opera never used to be something I could listen to,” he says. “It seemed something historical. But then you get older and the mid-1800s suddenly don’t seem so distant after all, you start listening to what they were doing then with a different ear.”

And so opera persists, sprawling langorously over the soft furnishings of the theatrical calendar, storing up the Kleenex for a really big hissy fit. This, in particular, is a transitional production for Scottish Opera; securing the services of a figure as eminent as McVicar — famed for his production of Billy Budd in Chicago and Carmen and La bohème at Glyndebourne — has been a keystone in rebuilding a company that four years ago was sobbing flamboyantly on the floor. An overambitious programme had brought the company close to financial ruin. A financial restructuring plan devised by the then-executive saw the loss of 88 jobs, a halt on performances for a year and accusations that Scottish Labour loathed the elitism of opera and wished to see it wither.

“It’s a different company and we’re in a different place now,” says Alex Reedijk, general director of Scottish Opera. “What happened a few years back was the result of a long series of complications. We’ve learned we have to take responsibility for our future and our success.” Four-fifths of Scottish Opera’s budget now comes directly from the Scottish Government.

The greying of society could bring opera further benefits. The novelist Ian McEwan and the comic Armando Iannucci are presently writing operas, apparently. For all its benefits, popular culture never quite got the hang of catering for the over-sixties and you do begin to crave a bit of copper-bottomed seriousness as the grave starts to beckon. And opera has all that in spades: the simple, eternal-dilemma plots, the feel-the-width costumery, the swish of the baton, the shade of those beardy European geniuses doing complex things with crotchets and semi-quavers.

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