Baby opera was humanity's first art form.

For all sorts of reasons opera – even comic opera – is usually no laughing matter.

Tom Sutcliffe, Believing in Opera, 1997

Ask any professional musician the secret of good music and they will tell you that above all else, music is about emotion. This perhaps particularly true of opera, where the main instrument is the human voice and the main topic the human condition. Through music and drama, story and spectacle, opera aims to explore the highs and lows of life. Anger, joy, love, grief, jealousy and despair are all portrayed in exuberant spectacle. Richard Mantle, director of Opera North, calls it ‘the art form that comes closest to expressing pure emotion’. Writer George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Opera is when a soprano and a tenor want to make love but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.’ Opera is deliberately intense and emotionally manipulative, although, as arts broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe observes, opera does not do comedy well. The pressure is too great and the stakes are too high.

Opera is technically, logistically and economically forbidding. Many fans of opera are unapologetic that it is the most extreme example of human art. Oliver Mears, director of opera at the Royal Opera in London thinks that ‘opera is important because it is totally unfeasible’. He adds that ‘in scale and cost it is the most excessive of all art forms, and in the totality of its artistic claims, is the most ambitious’. It is surprising then to learn not only that people make opera for babies, but that baby opera might have been the birth of all human art.

Musical Rumpus have been making operas for audiences of babies since 2011. Supported by the Spitalfields Music charity, their shows have been seen by around 15,000 babies in east London and beyond. I knew about them, but for a long time I had no idea what was involved. When I stumbled into the world of baby music myself, I decided it was time to find out. I know nothing about opera, so I took along my friend Sam Wass who, prior to becoming a baby scientist, was an opera director in Berlin. The last time I had been to anything resembling opera was a school trip to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance when I was twelve. My two abiding memories were that yes, indeed, comic opera is no laughing matter and that despite it being incredibly loud, I fell asleep. Therefore, even though it was opera for babies, I felt a bit intimidated and was glad Sam was there for moral support and to poke me if l looked drowsy.

Sam and I joined the tiny audience for Musical Rumpus’s latest show, Fogonogo, an opera about a volcano. It was the eighth show the company have created and the seventh collaboration between composer Sam Glazer and writer and director Zoe Palmer. Just like grown-up opera, baby opera is a full multimedia experience, with set, staging, costumes and orchestra, albeit on a much smaller scale, as the budgets and the subsidies are as diminutive as the audience. The cast consists of just two singers – we saw a performance by Lucy Knight, a soprano, and Peter Braithwaite, a baritone. The orchestra on this occasion had two musicians: Sam Glazer played the cello, accompanied by Rosie Bergonzi, a percussionist. The venue was modest too, one panelled-off corner of the public library in Stratford, east London. Buggies were parked and babies and their carers all found places to sit. The audience was small in number – around 20 babies, although previous shows have had as many as 50 babies, and then it really is a rumpus.