Ulvi Yurtsever wrote:

>>It might be said that the highest concentration per square mile of top
>>quality brain cells in the world are to be found in the Boston area and
>>yet the city has no opera house ... is there some explanation?
>
>Maybe it tells you something about opera:)
>
>[Now everyone please relax; this is only a joke, assuming it makes it past
>our moderator.]

A good joke--but it touches on something very real. Opera is probably
the least intellectual of classical music forms, relying as it does on
spectacle and (usually) a loose musical structure, sometimes merely a
succession of pieces related only by their relevance to an extramusical
text. I remember when I was in college (yes, in the Boston area), I used
to denigrate opera, precisely because it lacked the kind of intellectual
rigor I could find in the instrumental and vocal works of the great
masters. In fact, I even remember arguing that the musical cultural level
of a community was in inverse proportion to the respect with which it
treated opera. It's only relatively recently that I've realized the error
of my ways. I love opera now, but in most cases it takes a different
listening approach than that to, say, The Well-Tempered Clavier or
Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 131.

Peter Goldstein