There’s a passage in Martin Crimp’s impeccable libretto for Written on Skin that describes a page of illuminated manuscript. The ink, he tells us, stays forever wet – alive with moist, fleshy, indecent human reality rather than dried into decorous fixity. As a metaphor for storytelling, it’s potent; as a description of George Benjamin’s score, it’s close to literal.

It was the best and worst of years for English National Opera. Best, because principals, chorus and orchestra seem united in acclaiming their Music Director of 14 months, Mark Wigglesworth, for his work at a level most had only dreamed of (“from the bottom up,” said a cellist, contrasting it with the top-down approach of predecessor Edward Gardner). Worst, because he stayed true to his principle of only working with a full-time company, and when the chorus unexpectedly accepted a nine-month contract, announced his departure.

Fiftysomething may well be the new 32, the age Strauss and Hofmannsthal made the central figure of the Marschallin in their "comedy for music" Der Rosenkavalier. Hearts and minds no doubt still move with Renée Fleming, senior doyenne of the role in Robert Carsen's Royal Opera production, but she is mirroring her character in bowing out gracefully to the next generation, and fellow American Rachel Willis-Sørensen is clearly the new Princess Werdenberg on the Viennese block.

Der Rosenkavalier is an opera of thresholds. Characters are caught between states – girlhood and marriage, lover and lover-no-more, woman and whatever lies beyond sexuality and desirability – while around them a city and a nation are also poised on the brink, blocking out the noisy winds of change with waltzes that swirl ever more urgently through parquet ballrooms and gilded staterooms. Doorways give way to doorways in Robert Carsen’s new production of the opera, drawing the eye endlessly forwards, though without ever revealing what really lies ahead.

Jonathan Kent’s Manon Lescaut is back for a first revival at Covent Garden. It’s a gaudy affair, and seems calculated to provoke. But there are some interesting ideas here, and the musical standards remain high, even from the lesser-known names of this second-run cast.

Human sacrifice and long-term reconciliation are serious matters for music-drama. Not that you'd know it from Handel's pasticcio or confectionary of previous operatic hits, nor from Gerard Jones's one-note production. For strip-cartoon violence Tarantino-style you need panache, and there’s little of that here. Interesting, too, that Handel gets hardly a look-in throughout the interview Jones the Younger gives in the programme. More important, does he serve the fledgling dramatic abilities of fellow trainees on the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme?

The Tales of Hoffmann is a young man’s piece, full of melodic energy and helter-skelter narrative thrust. We tumble from love affair to love affair, lusting, losing and leaving three women in barely three hours, before taking peevish refuge in the comforts of art. John Schlesinger’s 1980 production may have its visual compensations, but lively it ain’t (barely alive at all, at times), and now on its eighth revival is looking decidedly arthritic. Thanks to tenor Vittorio Grigolo, however, it’s sounding pretty damn fine.

You wait ages for a Norma, and then three come along at once. English National Opera saw something nasty in the woodshed back in February with their 19th-century American take on Bellini, while up at the Edinburgh Festival this summer the opera’s original Romans and Druids traded togas for Tricolores and relocated to Nazi-occupied Paris. Now, bringing things right up to date, the Royal Opera give us a contemporary clerical fantasy of a production courtesy of La Fura dels Baus’s Àlex Ollé.

The Royal Opera’s Boris Godunov production made the short trip from Covent Garden to South Ken for the company’s appearance at the 2016 Proms. The opera (here in its original 1869 version) is a good choice for concert presentation: as Antonio Pappano writes in the programme, much of its music approaches oratorio. That is particularly true of the choral numbers, and the work is a tour de force for the Royal Opera Chorus. But every aspect of the music is this production is strong, so the gains balanced the losses, despite the minimal visual presentation.

New operas are a risky business, or so the Royal Opera’s past experience teaches us. For years, visiting the company’s Linbury Studio Theatre was like rolling the dice while on a losing streak: vain, desperate hope followed inevitably by disappointment. Glare, The Virtues of Things, Clemency, the failed experiment that was OperaShots. But recently things have taken a turn. Gradually, thanks to works from Birtwistle, Haas and more, the risk has begun to pay off.