If the opera world slips into a familiar quiver of nostalgia when another of its shining stars says goodbye, there is a good reason. Where is the new generation of opera superstars and when will they pull off the same trick as José Carreras — capturing not just classical fans, but the mass audience as well?

For the cynics, the rebuttal is that Carreras, Domingo and the late Pavarotti created something of a monster in the Three Tenors. They set the trend for amplified and soft-focus arrangements of bite-size opera, or show tunes, planting the seed for the rise of the autonomous genre of crossover in which such odd creatures as Il Divo, Paul Potts and — surely only a matter of time — Susan Boyle would thrive.

Yet none of the Three Tenors ever forgot where they had come from. Their skills had been honed by decades of hard graft at Covent Garden, La Scala or the New York Metropolitan, places where they remained regular visitors. What is strange and frustrating is that so few of their successors seem able to master that balance and longevity.

On that front, the timing of Carreras’s announcement is revealing. Only last week the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón, long thought the great white hope of opera, announced that he was cancelling all his engagements for the year — the second time that he has had to clear his diaries because of stress or illness.

Villazón is only 37, yet relentless hype from his record company and overtaxing demands from the world’s opera houses, perhaps too freely accepted, have taken their toll. And his contemporaries fare little better: only three or four years ago, all the talk was of “a new Pavarotti”, the young Italian Salvatore Licitra. Today he languishes on the fringes.

Other high-profile names, Roberto Alagna and José Cura among them, have sapped their status with maverick choices and eccentric demands. If they want the headlines written when they call time on their careers, they’ll have to follow Carreras’s example, and we’ll just have to calm down. World-grabbing talent takes time.

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