Opera is not a small artform. It is labyrinthine, multi-faceted, fraught with things that can go disastrously wrong (Wagner, especially), and it can be dreadfully expensive, formidably divisive, and astonishingly complicated. At the same time, opera is so necessarily crucial to culture as a reflection of history, thought, and society that one simply cannot imagine a world without it.

The question, though, is how to contain four hundred years of European opera when it is the subject of a major and exhaustive retrospective occupying the entirety of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new basement-level Sainsbury Gallery? Opera: Passion, Power and Politics, a masterly and magnificent show that demands to be seen as well as heard, is at once a reduction and an expansion. Just like Google Earth, what you see depends on your point of view. At its furthest point (imagine Europe from space), the exhibition condenses the opera world to just seven operas and the seven cities where they received their premières. Zoom in, and the landscape becomes more and more detailed. Instead of highways, towns, and coffee shops, there are manuscripts, documents, portraits, landscapes, objets d’art, original instruments, bric-a-brac, sets and costumes, hats, busts, effigies and caricatures: the very symbols and ephemera of opera, but enriched by the re-creation of its various ages and the chronological and cultural continuity that link the seven composers, works and traditions on display.