I'm surprised Bix crossed my mind, to be honest: he doesn't often.

Neither of the operas that I've seen this year (Judith Weir's A Night at the Chinese Opera and Nigel Osborne's Differences in Demolitions) would fit the Verdian or Handelian model in the slightest, hh: yet despite (or perhaps more accurately exactly because of) this, they both worked brilliantly on their own terms and came extremely close to fulfilling all my requirements suggested above.

But the new and the old should be feeding off each other as a continuous dialogue, Rei. Older operas are only museum pieces if they are seen purely as artefacts of the past, with no modern relevance - although that most definitely isn't tendered as an excuse for certain contemporary directors using opera as a clothes horse on which to hang their own alien concepts: contemporary relevance has to be discovered within a piece, not imposed from the outside.

From the C17th onwards (and probably before that, but we don't have too much solid evidence) it was expected and required that the librettist himself would stage the piece.  There is an urban myth that "there were no stage directors before the late C19th" - this is untrue.  It's more that stage-directors exterior to the creation of the piece emerged as a cult profession at the end of the C19th.  If you look at Vanbrugh's THE REHEARSAL or Sheridan's THE CRITIC, both satirise hopeless amateurish authors who can only do half the expected job (the writing) - they're unable to achieve the other half (putting it on stage in a successful way).

In fact the great majority of the internal rivalries which brought the "Royal Academy Of Music" crashing-down on the heads of Handel and Bononcini was not about the music at all - it was about clashes between Rolli (a rather b-grade poet, author of many of Bononcini's libretti, and a theatre-director with several summer season's experience in Italy) versus Haym, a cellist with literary abilities and a strong sense for drama,  whose natural instincts for staging his own libretti outstripped the official "Literary Director" of the Academy (Rolli).

Let's remember that Wagner preferred to hand the baton for his operas to more experienced hands - so that he could stage the pieces himself  (no-one else has ever been credited with staging them during RW's lifetime).   So this author/director synthesis was alive and well during the C19th.

In recent years Peter Sellars has partially restored this tradition - taking an advisory role in the creation and rewriting of libretti, and creating some of his own.  David Pountney has written libretti too.   If only more librettists were obliged to see their ideas through to the first night (instead of walking away after emailing the script to the composer) we might see fewer landlocked, "unstagable" shows.   One of the FIVE:FIFTEEN shows I mentioned fell into this bracket - Ian Rankin's GESUALDO was a miserable brace of cod-operatic cliches which were so very bad that they made the show unintentionally comic in nature    I've never seen so much tomato ketchup since Peter O'Toole's MACBETH.