I'm always rather wary of blanket pronouncements - statements a bit like "I dislike all Taylor guitars" or "I dislike opera" or "I dislike all Volvos", etc. Such pronouncements seem a little simplistic, on the whole, and deny the chance of individual assessment of the thing in question.

I could say, with some some truth, that I'm not - on the whole - a fan of choral music, that I'm not - on the whole - a fan of church organ music, and that I'm irreligious. Going on those statements, I should really hate Janacek's "Glagolitic Mass", which is a huge choral mass in an obscure Czech language (Glagolitic), with a massive organ section in the last section. But I love it, and I think it's one of the greatest pieces of 20th century music.

To take "opera" as genre, once you dig into it, there are huge differences in style and approach from composer to composer - producing works which are as different from each other as chalk and cheese. "Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly" have been mentioned in previous posts - both examples of a tradition in both French and Italian opera in which arias and formal choruses are interspersed with spoken or sung recitative. Wagner changed the shape of all this when conceived opera as a continuous piece of music with sets, costumes, music all woven into one art form. Janacek went out into his native Czech countryside, noting down speech rhythms, the sounds of animals and insects, the feel of nature all round him - and then composed "The Cunning Little Vixen", in which nearly all the parts are animals. Utterly different again from Bizet, Puccini and Wagner.

It's worth digging deeper sometimes. Even if you end up hating it, at least you can say "I hate it" with informed conviction!