Aaron J Rabushka admonishes: >Wait a minute--operas for lent? In many places the opera houses were >closed for lent. Was there, by contrast, somewhere where lenten opera >was emphasized? Back in the dawn of opera when,say, Peri's Dafne was premiered at the Palazzo Corsi in Florence, "opera houses" were the abodes of the aristocracy. They closed only (and then only partially) when the owner moved to his outlying villa for the summer. Lent being the slow season between Carneval and Easter, the maecenases of the day had stuff specifically composed to enliven those 40 days--and, of course, others, too. For highly religious periods, such as Christmas and Easter, orders went out for masses and oratorios. Later when the patronage of music became embourgoised and commercial, themes became less seasonal. Denis Fodor