Roy Ellefsen comments:

>Walter Meyer wrote that Tosca is much more realistic than The Magic Flute.
>He wrote that he prefers to listen to the music and ignore the plot.  I
>agree, but at least the plot in Flute is entertaining.  ...
>
>the music is what matters.  And, if Tosca is realistic, Butterfly is
>almost a post WWII documentary.  If forced, I'd keep Mozart and abandon GP,
>but I certainly wouldn't do it because of Mozart's realism.

I realize that we all have our attitudes towards what we believe is
'realism' that are hard to negotiate around, for lack of a better phrase.
Nothing anyone tells me is going to make a particular opera more enjoyable
for me just because someone has convinced me that the level of realism is
'just right'.  So we're all going to be talking past each other on that
score.

The only hope I see is to regard opera the way we regard something else.

For instance, consider Star Wars.  there's a series of movies that is,
at the same time, incredibly realistic, and incredibly fantastic.  I'm
sure there are words coined by the literary establishment (which has
already come up with such beauties as "deconstructionism" and
"post-modernism"--<chortle-chortle>) to describe this phenomenon.

Opera works, for me, when the characters' reaction to their situation is
plausible.  All I need is "sufficiently plausible"; not totally plausible.
And for this, I realize that I have to be a sympathetic audience.  There
are some degrees of sympathy that are just not in me, unfortunately.

Let's talk about Orpheus in the underworld.  What an incredibly
preposterous premise!  But it's perfectly fine.  (In fact, if I were to
ever write an opera, Mahler-hating Romantic that I am, it would probably
be based on that plot!  I wish it had a little more humor in it...)

I guess I'm a little disconcerted about the way the term 'realism' is
being used in this discussion.  A generalization of the idea of realism
is necessary to analyze certain aspects of audience response to a plot in
essentially a fantasy setting, but we need more sophisticated terminology
to discuss the various kinds of realism that apply in this context, and
which make sense.

Archimedes
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