At the height of the summer season Glyndebourne’s lawns look bleached. A panorama of pale, straw-like grass, bone Panama hats, white starched shirts, white linen tablecloths and, crowning it all, puffs of white hair. I watch men in mothballed tuxes negotiate the rose garden, unsteady on their feet, and fragile, bird-like women in pearls pushing their husbands’ wheelchairs, as I worry I should intervene.

I’d joked to friends I’d find my rich husband at Glyndebourne, but you’d have to be a gerontophile to get laid here. At 45, I’m the youngest by decades. The only attendees younger are a couple who confess they were given free tickets and a woman in gold lamé draped over an ageing partner.

Seeing Glyndebourne a blanket of candyfloss hair doesn’t trouble me for ageist reasons — more concerning is what it means for an already rarefied art that its supporters are dying. When they are gone, and with them their ticket purchases and generous donations, who will keep opera alive?

Opera has an age problem. The Arts Council reported in 2024 that “the highest proportion of bookers was from those 65+”. Timothée Chalamet’s recent declaration that “no one cares” about ballet or opera is concerning, not because it is true, but because a young artist believes it. Opera does try appealing to younger audiences. Sometimes in innovative ways, such as the ENO’s recent RBO/SHIFT festival exploring how artificial intelligence and opera intersect. And, more predictably, by pandering to a “woke” agenda — with New York’s Metropolitan Opera issuing trigger warnings about “racial stereotypes” in Turandot and the Royal Opera spending a year in racial consultation before braving staging Madame Butterfly. To what end? Young people don’t rush to see opera just because it’s politically correct.

Is money the issue? That certainly was my assumption. The Fortnum & Mason hampers stuffed with Nyetimber littering the lawns at Glyndebourne attest to opera’s exclusive price tag. Our tickets cost £260 each. Still, a weekend ticket to Glastonbury is £400 — plus drugs. At least Glyndebourne offers its under-40 members half-price tickets. And no one is stopping you from bringing Lambrusco and Lunchables.

But opera’s age problem isn’t about cash or political correctness. It reflects something more worrying: the death of a whole intellectual class.

In part, this is because our attention spans have been cauterised by our phones: we are slaves to the algorithm, addicted to dopamine, accustomed to instant gratification and constant distraction. No wonder young people, used to consuming music in 20-second TikTok clips, baulk at watching four hours of classical singing — however sublime.

More insidiously, the decline of opera among successive generations reflects a wider rejection of intellectualism itself. In her brilliant Atlantic essay about “the end of reading”, Rose Horowitch highlights not only the decline of reading (the proportion of Americans now reading for pleasure is so low — 16 per cent in 2023 — that gambling is a more popular pastime) but with it the waning of “higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis”; our ability to make ethical judgments, shape thoughts, appreciate nuance and complex ideas.

Drawing a thread to students, Horowitch reveals how universities worryingly encourage this intellectual demise. She cites an assistant director at Harvard who describes students using ChatGPT to “translate” A Clockwork Orange into easier language and other students who “now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge” to the extent they consider being given set books a hostile attack. As a lecturer myself I recognise the pressure to cater to this, not by encouraging students to contend with difficult work, but by presenting them with less complex texts.

Worryingly, rather than solve this crisis in intellectualism, Andy Burnham appears keen to exacerbate it by channelling less scholarly students into apprenticeships. But funnelling less academic children into manual labour robs them both of educational opportunities and the chance to be inspired by intellectual pursuits. As someone who has studied both plumbing and moral philosophy I can attest that while the former was harder, the latter stretched my mind in more interesting ways. Reading Shakespeare or studying Bizet may not offer “transferable marketplace skills” but there’s joy in learning for its own sake. The playfulness of intellectual curiosity; the thrill of acquiring knowledge; the challenge of grappling with complex ideas, the reward from studying things that take time to appreciate. Opera, with its hammy panto plot lines and soul-searing music, is not inaccessible but rewards attention and consideration — is Butterfly racist or does it present a critique of the faithless West? Does the beauty of the music accompanying Scarpia suggest not simple cruelty but his deranged desire for Tosca?

These are thrilling questions that a generation put off learning have lost interest in tackling. Not because young people are stupid, but because the brain, like any muscle, needs training. The pensioners at Glyndebourne are not killing opera. The education system that failed their grandchildren is.

I came to watch Puccini’s Tosca, but left feeling I’d witnessed opera’s death rattle.