Ticket prices that give people pretty reasonable access to a very good company is an exciting development.”With a chorus of about 40, an orchestra of 60, principal singers, backstage crews, scene-painters, wardrobe staff and wig-makers, opera is rarely going to prove an easy art form to stage on the cheap.But Mr Freud believes that whether through Operatunity or the Three Tenors, thousands of people are beginning to believe that opera could be an art form for them.”Once we get them through the doors, there is never any problem in enticing them back,” he said. The impact of that work is being seen in the cross-section of audiences going to the opera.”It is not the first time that a new dawn for opera has been predicted. When the nation went crazy for “Nessun Dorma” and the Three Tenors more than a decade ago, a boom was predicted. But many believe the surge in interest failed to translate into a permanent new audience for full-length operatic performance.Yet there are signs that opera has succeeded in ditching its elitist tag to reach a wider range of people. And the English National Opera (ENO) is offering more than 500 seats at under £10 every week at the newly refurbished Coliseum.The reductions follow research suggesting that price is the biggest deterrent for new audiences. “Pricing is always talked about in relation to opera,” he said.”People perceive that opera is expensive. But even its fiercest critics were won over when the final, in which two winners performed Rigoletto at the Coliseum, was watched by 8 million television viewers and three-quarters of the ticket-buyers in the auditorium were opera first-timers.Research at the Royal Opera House showed that 39 per cent of ticket-buyers for ballet and opera, after it reopened following a refurbishment, had not been before.Mr Freud believes that the WNO’s move from the New Theatre in Cardiff to the Wales Millennium Centre – the company’s first permanent base in its 58-year history – offers the best chance it has ever had to create new audiences.Mr Freud said it seemed obvious that his company should use the extra seat capacity in Cardiff to cut the price of admission.

Some thought the ENO had been influenced by populist reality TV when it took part in Channel 4’s search for opera talent, Operatunity. Companies hope that cut-price tickets will make opera an art form for the people.Anthony Freud, the WNO’s general director, said: “It seems to me that, collectively, the opera sector is beginning to win the long-term battle for general popularity.”We’ve all worked extremely hard to break down people’s misconceptions in a huge variety of ways. A third of the seats will be priced at £20 or less and the bottom prices will fall by 37 per cent to £5.The WNO is not alone. “For less than the cost of a ticket to Jerry Springer – The Opera, you can see Mozart, the opera,” is the venture’s clarion call.

Next month, Raymond Gubbay, the opera impresario who has made a success of large-scale opera at the Royal Albert Hall, launches his cut-price company at the Savoy Theatre in London, with ticket prices ranging from £10 o £49.50. But opera chiefs are aiming to make an evening at La Traviata as routine as catching George Clooney at the cinema, and yesterday the Welsh National Opera (WNO) became the latest company to announce cut-price seats. A night at the opera was once the province of the upper classes, a black-tie occasion for the champagne-swilling rich. On the contrary, we know of 50 centres around the country that can provide people with treatment who otherwise may go blind The situation … is a sham.”The RNIB said that, although many centres were willing and able to provide PDT, most primary care trusts had been unwilling to provide funding. The Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, it said, had the equipment and the staff but not the money.Mr Blair told MPs yesterday: “We are aware of the RNIB making these claims but they are disputed, I am afraid, by those that actually have to implement this policy”. A spokesman for the health department said that every district had been ordered to provide the treatment by July..