The recent tangent to the "greatest aria" thread has thrown up some stimulating opinions, not least Peter Goldstein's excellently lucid essay in defence of the Mozartian or Handelian Number Opera which an earlier correspondent had teasingly called "silly". Mr Goldstein's comments on Verdi's not entirely successful struggles to spin the through-written web in "Otello" are spot-on. Although he finally achieved the grail in "Falstaff", it is silly to suggest that this delectable final fruit is manifestly superior to Verdi's middle period masterpieces such as "Rigoletto" and "Il Trovatore" - only different, in so far as it was written first and foremost to please himself. Goldstein's argument mainly concerned Mozart - unquestionably the most significant operatic composer in the Western tradition - but his reminders of the advantages of the Numbers structure hold equally true for Mozart's greatest mentor, Handel, whose finest operas offer equally astounding miracles of musical organisation. Handel's pattern of intense, sometimes frantic, recitative action succeeded by deeply contemplative or energetic lyric reaction to it gives his work a psychological and dramatic depth - as well as a variety - missing from, say, "Moses und Aaron", where the psychology is primitive and philosophical 'significance' all too close to the surface. I add that, for me, and despite its monolithic blandness, "Moses" remains an absorbing work - albeit one about as modern as Brahms. I hesitate to suggest this, but compared with the best of Handel and Mozart, even Wagner and Strauss's theatre works can seem obvious, long-winded and inflexible - this quite aside from their musical "longeurs", which to be fair tend to vanish in theatrical production. Only an insensitive critic would seek to prove that there was anything in, say, "Gotterdamerung" to surpass the powerful musical and dramatic impact of Bajazet's death scene in "Tamerlano". Wagner and Handel are pursuing different goals, and that sort of prize-fight approach to music is pointless. The special qualities of the best pre-romantic operas, of course, are only apparent once we have the courage to drop any preconceived notions that somehow through-written romantic music drama is an "improvement" on the classical model. That earlier correspondent (whose name unfortunately escapes me) was I think jovially contrasting the bad, old recitative-aria structures with the modern, progressive through-written kind. That's fine as a matter of personal taste, but it won't do as an artistic prescription. First, it enshrines a traditional notion of Artistic Progress which I thought had been exploded a long time ago. Second, it displays a limited understanding of what has been happening on the operatic stage since Teutonic hegemony was broken, even before the early years of the last century. Like it or not, the Numbers Opera is back (even in Germany) and co-existing happily with its younger sibling. Did it ever really go away? "Wozzeck"; "The Rakes Progress"; Orff's "Antigone"; "L'Enfant et les Sortileges"; "The Turn of the Screw" and "The Rape of Lucretia" are just a few of the established repertory pieces in the classical mould that come to mind, but there are plenty more. Berg, like his operatic heir Britten, needed to utilize the swift-moving flexibility and contrast which the through-written model could not provide, and reacted accordingly. The 20th century even produced new forms which don't quite fit either the romantic or pre/post-romantic models - Tippett's film-cut or musical collage techniques in "King Priam" and "The Knot Garden" come to mind, as does the Glass/Wilson "Einstein on the Beach". Progress is a chimera. Different solutions suggest themselves for different times and places. For us, in the fast-forward early years of the 21st Century, the quick-witted, fluid music drama of Mozart is perhaps most congenial to the majority of thinking listeners; closer to us, more easily assimilated than the leisurely gravity of the German romantics. Its popularity does not mean it is more superficial or trivial, either musically or dramatically. Most of us are only too happy to be able to use our imaginations to revel in the best of a huge range of operatic work across time and place, rather than to glorify one temporal set of techniques at the expense of another. Christopher Webber, Blackheath, London, UK. http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm "ZARZUELA!"