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Now here’s a scene I find hard to imagine happening at Covent Garden. It occurred this week in Oslo at the opening of a splendid new opera house, the national home for Norway’s opera and ballet companies. At the opening gala, in front of several of Europe’s crowned heads, foreign dignitaries and an invited audience, the final speech from the stage came not from the culture minister, but from the minister for defence. She (I’m not sure we’d see that over here either) proclaimed to a thunderous ovation: “Without culture we have nothing worth defending.”