DURING my six years on the outskirts of the music world, I have often watched and listened as people in the classical music business strewed themselves with ashes and wept bitterly over the approaching death of the art.

As I listen, it is evident that the problems under discussion are two: quantity and quality. Because of an apparent lessening of interest in classical music and because anyone who wants to can download music from the internet, fewer and fewer discs are sold every year. With declining sales, the remaining companies are increasingly reluctant to invest in the recording of discs that will not earn back what is invested in them. As to quality: how to measure that in a world in which Charlotte Church sells in the millions and Andrea Bocelli is a household name? Various causes for the declining health of classical music are bandied about: less teaching of classical music in the schools, cuts in government subsidies to theatres, a growing scepticism about the very concept of high culture, with a resulting sense of alienation from it.

One cause that seldom speaks its name is the fear people often feel in the face of classical music. They’ve never heard it, no one they know listens to it, so it can’t be very good. It seems to me that this is the one problem about which something can most easily be done.

Classical music has, in common with other forms of music, the power to flay the listener with its passion and power as well as to speak of some sort of celestial wholeness. But even the business of writing those words makes me cringe, for they sound so much like the sort of pretentious nonsense under which art too often finds itself buried.

To practical details, then. The conductor Alan Curtis and I share a conviction that Handel’s music, well played and well sung, has that transforming power. He is the composer who most succeeds in making us happy. You’ll get no musicological piffle from me: it’s all about being happy.

The major work of Alan and Il Complesso Barocco, a period-instrument orchestra which he started more than 20 years ago, is the performance and recording of Handel’s operas. He and I believe it a worthy endeavour to leave a record of how these operas could be presented in our times. Two years ago their recording of Deidamia won the German music critics’ award as the year’s best opera disc.

Another part of the programme is a series of concerts in which the music is interspersed with my reading those passages from my books which have a theme or emotion similar to that in an aria, though occasionally I read things just because I like them and the singers do the same, and then we force Alan to invent some musicologically convincing explanation for the choices.

Music is mentioned occasionally in my books: for example, in Acqua Alta a scene takes place to the background of Ombre pallide from Alcina. During some concerts I’ll read the passage, then the soprano sings the aria. If we’re working with a mezzo or a contralto I’ll find a passage dealing with lament or loss, which were more often written for the lower voice and at a slower tempo.

Because the books appeal to a different audience than does Handelian opera, each time we do a concert some new listeners are exposed to a form of music they might never have heard before. After one of them, a trio of French punks came up to the soprano and said: “Wow. I don’t know anything about that music, but it was great and I love it. And you’re great.”

Another time, Alan wrote a perfectly Baroque introduction, only to have the orchestra and soprano segue into Kurt Weill’s Surabaya Johnny. When the audience heard the joke, their laughter drowned out the soprano for a moment, but then they grew silent and listened until the end, when they erupted with applause. The next aria was Handel’s Piangeró, which did, indeed, bring some of them to tears.

We do it because it is such glorious, limitless fun. We get to hear these operas and arias take shape, hear them sung in a faintly different way each time, get to feel that electrifying buzz that great art can give, and yes, we get the sense that other people, too, take the same joy in hearing it. We could do far worse things with our lives.

• Donna Leon’s latest novel is Blood From a Stone (William Heinemann).