‘The rays of the sun conquer the night’ sings Sarastro, at the end of Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte. It was the Royal Opera’s first performance of January 2023 and there’s something profoundly consoling about seeing this of all operas at the midnight of the year. The lights dim; five chords ring out and that first triplet from the violins falls quietly into place as Mozart engages the gears and together we move off on our long, sweet journey towards light. In David McVicar’s staging, robed figures process down the auditorium bearing glowing orbs, while Tamino, in late 18th-century frock-coat and knee-boots, clambers out from the boxes and vanishes through a portal in the front-cloth. There is a world elsewhere.

And then we’re off. McVicar’s production – and with it John Macfarlane’s designs – has been around since 2003, and in a word, it’s sublime. That’s to say proper, Edmund Burke-ish, awe-and-mystery sublime: the Enlightenment maturing into the Romantic in a world of shadow, mist and vast ceremonial spaces. Star-filled heavens swirl in the background, the constellations marked out to imply the presence of a guiding intelligence. McVicar and Macfarlane draw on visual references ranging from Anselm Kiefer to Karl Friedrich Schinkel by way of Joseph Wright of Derby – not as some knowing in-joke, but to unlock a rich network of emotional and philosophical associations. It’s grand, it’s mysterious, and at times it’s intensely beautiful.

For a 19-year-old staging it scrubs up well (Angelo Smimmo is the revival director). Whether it delivers on the seasonal promise of escapist family fun (and the pantomime qualities of Die Zauberflöte might be the most sublime thing about it) is another question. Poor Papageno seems almost crushed by all this solemnity, though Leon Kosavic sings warmly. Indeed, the singing throughout was uncommonly fine. Kathryn Lewek brought the right sort of vocal megawattage to the Queen of the Night, while Long Long made a likeable, lyrical Tamino. René Pape was gruff and grave as Sarastro and Jacquelyn Stucker illuminated the darkness as Pamina: distilling strength from sweetness and (in that transcendent moment just before the final Trials) reducing me to a tearful, choked-up mess.

This was a noble Zauberflöte, and it feels ungrateful to suggest that something was missing. No complaints about the conducting of Maxim Emelyanychev – sprinkling historically informed zest over a broadly lyrical interpretation that gave the woodwinds space to respond, often touchingly, to the singers’ phrasing. The problem was the absence of the pantomime element – that playful, life-affirming touch of the demotic. No amount of puppetry, however charming, can replace the human connection that you feel in a theatre when Papageno starts bantering with the audience. The Royal Opera performs Die Zauberflöte in German – something relatively rare in the UK outside Covent Garden and the country house circuit – and you can’t expect a gag to land when you need surtitles to understand the punchline.

English National Opera performs in English as a matter of policy, and is derided for doing so – as if Opera North, Welsh National Opera and English Touring Opera (to name just three) don’t also regularly present Mozart in the vernacular. At the time of writing, ENO has just been given a tenuous stay of execution by the Arts Council of England, with no serious long-term assurances about the company’s future. Meanwhile, the statistical basis for the ACE’s recent funding decisions has been discredited and Liverpool and Milton Keynes have, at a stroke, lost all their live professional opera. If you believed, even for a second, that there was ever a credible plan to relocate ENO to Manchester, I’ve got a slice of prime West End real estate to sell you.

ENO ended 2022 with a concert staging of Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana, directed by Ruth Knight. The cast (which included Robert Murray as a testosterone-fuelled Earl of Essex, and Christine Rice burning the house down as Elizabeth I – imperious, vulnerable and capricious) performed in ruffs and breeches against a black-clad chorus, while period engravings were projected on a gauze screen. Martyn Brabbins conducted, and the ENO orchestra flashed with dark poetry: a remarkable accomplishment for a single performance.

But that performance was packed: aficionados had clearly turned out in force. Gloriana contains musical marvels, but the drama is broken-backed and the reasons why it has never entered the repertoire were plain enough to hear. Still, it’s a work of real historical significance, and if it didn’t merit revival in 2022; well then, when? If we’re going to have subsidised opera companies, curation and reappraisal of our national operatic heritage is surely an essential part of their remit. ENO has showed that it takes that responsibility seriously. Its enemies: rather less so.