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