Julia Werthimer wrote:

>Well.  Puccini was an opera composer and, as has been mentioned lately,
>there is not much enthusiasm for opera on this list, to my regret. ...
>
>But Puccini seems to suffer a special fate: his work is so popular and
>tuneful that many CM buffs turn up their noses at it.  At present I don't
>feel I want to hear or see Boheme or Tosca for quite a good while - but
>he was a superb craftsman, no doubt about it,IMHO.  I particularly admire
>the parlando passages in some of his operas - the chit-chat among the
>Bohemians, for example.

I've always enjoyed Butterfly, Boheme and Tosca.  (I like to say that
Butterfly was the first opera I didn't go to.  A school friend and I had
decided to go standing room to its first performance at the Met after WWII.
We didn't get there early enough.  The line was already around the corner.
We missed the cutoff by about 20 feet!) Except for Liu's aria, and perhaps
"Nessun Dorma" I don't find Turandot that special and I found La Rondine,
which I recently heard at the Kennedy Center, frightfully dull.

What I really want to know is, why is it that my wife, who isn't a
particular fan of classical music in general or opera in particular
(although not totally unfamiliar w/ either), whenever she hears any
Puccini passage from any opera asks me, "Is that from Madam Butterfly?"

Walter Meyer