Denis Fodor wrote:

>Not only that, but I find the the genre of "faction" in writing as a whole,
>and not just relative to music, unpleasant because devious.  If the author
>lacks sufficient knowledge of his subject to create a work of art from it,
>he should then at least have the decency to desist from falsifying history.
>The most obvious way of doing that is to drop the project and go on to
>something else.  Thus, to my mind, the movie not only travestied Mozart
>(and Salieri) but testified to the capriciousness, rather than the art,
>of its makers.

So what about operas based on "faction"? Should we ban them? What
about "Guglielmo Tell", what about "Klinghoffer's Death", what about
"Tosca"'s Scarpia, what about plays like Puschkin's "Mozart and Salieri"
or Shakespeare's royal dramas? History is falsified in all these works
of art.  I think it is simply ridiculous to ban all art that plays with
history and people from history.  The artist is free to do what he want,
there are no rules in the kingdom of art - and if he wants to be capricious
(Shaffer isn't, in my opinion), we have to suffer it.  I am not interested
in turning Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert into divine persons who must
not be touched by "devious" hands.

Robert