It’s not especially hard to get inexpensive tickets to the opera if you live in, say, New York. But it’s not so easy if you live hundreds of miles from a major opera house. Opera’s rarity, however, does not make it a “more elevated” form than, say, musical theater, argues Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times. Musicals may have market share, and opera may barely sustain itself from a dwindling pool of private donors, but the comic operas of Mozart once played broadly to mass audiences, “and there is no bigger crowd pleaser than Leoncavallo’s impassioned ‘Pagliacci.’