How to represent, without much in the way of music or drama, an art form that exists solely through extended seeing and listening? That was the question for Kate Bailey, curator of the V&A’s new opera exhibition (runs until 25 February 2018).

The show – inaugurating the cavernous Sainsbury Gallery – has great and original ambitions: to position opera at the centre of the past 400 years of European cultural and social history as mirror, soundtrack, heartbeat. And with a lot of curatorial energy and imagination, plus the museum’s own vast stock of decorative arts, it does a pretty good job.