Secco Recit

The Metropolitan opera has announced their 2016-17 season, and at a glance, I think it's a much stronger season than the current one. Let's break it down a little. The current season consists of twenty-four operas: Anna Bolena The Barber Of Seville La Boheme Cavalleria Rusticana / Pagliacci Don Pasquale La Donna Del Lago Elektra L'Elisir D'Amore Die Entfuhrung Aus Dem Serail Die Fledermaus Lulu Madama Butterfly Manon Lescaut Maria Stuarda Le Nozze Di Figaro Otello Le Pecheurs De Perles Rigoletto Roberto Devereux Simon Boccanegra Tannhauser Tosca Il Trovatore Turandot (I have to wonder: When the Met does The Barber Of Seville in English, that's what they call it, but when they do it in Italian, they call it Il Barbriere Di Siviglia. Same with Hansel And Gretel or Hansel Und Gretel and Die Zauberflote or The Magic Flute. So why don't they call their English-translated holiday production The Bat?) That's sixteen tragedies, six...

The way you're brought up can affect how you view the world in some seriously strange ways. I, for instance, was brought up with the card game Set. We would mostly (and still do, though less frequently, particularly as we add new games to our collection) play this game on family trips during the evenings when we had nothing else to do. So I've never played Set  seriously or competitively (if that's even a thing), but over the years of playing it occasionally, it seems to have become thoroughly ingrained in my mind. This Tetris effect has been lying in wait for quite some time before it decided to to come out into the open. I was thinking the other day about Donizetti's three queens. I know it wasn't his intention for them to be presented holistically as a trilogy, but that's the way they are today, and so that's the way I was thinking about them. And in particular, I was thinking about all the reasons they make for a terrible trilogy. I mean, I love the th...