In a message dated 3/28/2002 9:13:30 AM Pacific Standard Time, Mezzoid@a... writes:
> <A HREF="http://www.jsonline.com/enter/tvradio/mar02/30513.asp">Click here: JS Online: Jerry's an opera! Can Oprah be far behind?</A>
There's a really great article about the opera in the March 17 edition of the Sunday New York Times magazine. Brought up great issues regarding the ridiculous pretenses so much of opera has nowadays, which are a far cry from the pretenses under which opera was in its infancy. "It's absurd to think of opera as grand or stodgy," Morris (artistic director of the Battersea Arts Center) says. "If you'd have characterized it that way to Mozart or Gluck, they'd have laughed you off the premises. Opera evolved as a crude and accessible form. The audience would be eating dinner or having sex while watch it! So the idea now that one should sit in a grim-faced state to impress the president of his company and suffer through, well, that's just madness." I, personally, like it very much when the boundaries between all the different forms become melded and the forms each get a shot in the arm, since that is a more direct expression of our amalgamated culture and society nowadays than the ivory towered, arcane approach. And what else is a successful expressive art, than an accurate projection of the culture that spawned it? TinaO
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