Deryk Barker and John Wiser demonstrate that Fascism is still a hot button issue. Please don't kill the messenger, folks, but it is a regrettable historical fact that Puccini was made an honorary member of the Fascist Party, which came to power in 1922 and, in 1924, the year he died, he was made Senatore del Regno. He may not have sought these dubious distinctions but he did not refuse them either. (See _Puccini, A Critical Biography_ by Mosco Carner, 2nd ed. 1974, p. 219.) If this spoils some people's appreciation for his music, I may regret bringing this up. Sometimes mental compartmentalization can be a salutary thing. Anyway, I certainly was not endorsing the article I read; it represents the same kind of music criticism that reads rape into Beethoven's Ninth symphony or homosexuality into Schubert's Unfinished Symphony but, for anyone interested, the author's argument was based on Puccini's harmony, particularly in Tosca, Act II. (To lighten things a bit, there was a New Yorker cartoon once of a man, about to be put on hold on the telephone, asking to listen to that music while waiting--a real insider's joke.) I suppose now I'll have to dig up that article. BTW, going back about three centuries to Gozzi with a characteristically 20th Century label is a real stretch, though not unprecidented, I suppose. (Existentialism was pushed back to Shakespeare, wasn't it?) Jim Tobin