Those lights! Thinking back on The Galloping Cure, Missy Mazzoli’s new opera for the Edinburgh International Festival, that’s what lingers: cascades of lights, shimmering and flickering in every hue that modern LED technology can supply. At first the effect is almost Zen – soothing washes of pinks and blues and ochres, with carousel horses rising and weaving among them. Then, as the action intensifies and the characters succumb to collective mania, they’re brighter, faster, more aggressive: a frantic sensory overload, flashing to the rave-derived backbeat of Mazzoli’s score. Lucy Carter’s lighting designs are meant to transfix you, and they really do.

Hardly the point of an opera, you might say. Nonsense: in this of all arts, visual spectacle is as necessary as music; and has been ever since Monteverdi first dazzled Venetian audiences with fireballs and heavenly chariots. I went to the second performance, and word was already out that the world première the previous night had been cheered to the rafters. According to one headline, I was about to see one of the greatest operas of the 21st century, though admittedly the bar is not high. In the era of Balfe, a Meyerbeer will always seem exceptional.

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