So that's it, folks, for an epic year of opera-going. I've been to 42 operas (44 if you count Il Trittico as three), all but five of them in London, and looking through the list makes me realise what a fabulous variety of opera we have access to in London.
I finished 2010 at the large scale end of things with a Royal Opera Tannhäuser: my last opera of 2011 was at the other end of the scale with Open Door's tiny production of Hansel and Gretel in a pub theatre. The chamber opera scene is vibrant in London right now: I've been to five different companies (and there are several more that I didn't get to) and seen chamber versions of works as diverse as Verdi's Il Trovatore, Offenbach's La Belle Hélène (artfully renamed Troy Boy and even a real rarity in the shape of Vaughan Williams's Hugh the Drover, most done to a very high standard.
The standards are also high in our student productions, which yielded two of the most memorable evenings of the year in the shape of the Royal Academy's Threepenny Opera and the Guildhall's rendering of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites - who would have thought that a plot line that basically goes "nuns get worried" could yield such drama?
The big houses, ENO and the Royal Opera, gave us their usual mix of standard repertoire leavened with small amounts of new or obscure work, within their very different artistic styles. The new works were fascinating: I gave five stars to the ROH's controversial Anna Nicole, which several critics considered sensationalist rubbish, while ENO's The Passenger provided one of the biggest wow moments of the year, when the violinist Tadek plays Bach's D minor Chaconne as an emblem of the greatness of German culture, to be overwhelmed by Weinberg's vivid orchestral portrayal of the crude ugliness of Nazism. Older but obscure repertoire yielded some delights as well. The ROH version of Rimsky's The Tsar's Bride opened a window into an operatic style that we don't often hear, as well as providing another of those wow moments in the shape of Ekaterina Gubanova's marvellous unaccompanied lament. ENO's Young Vic rendering of Monteverdi's Ritorno d'Ulisse in patria was musically wonderful if baffling on stage.