Thanks for the heads-up, Maggie!

I checked our local listings and came up madder than a boiled owl!

Both of our local PBS affiliates, KCTS in Seattle and KBTC in Tacoma are in the middle of their all-too-frequent beg-a-thons, which, within recent years, seem to occur every couple of months and go on for WEEKS! Current fare consists of two hours of Elvis Presley singing gospel songs, an Ed Sullivan Show retrospective, a guitarist who does his damnedest to play flamenco with a PICK while backed by drums and string bass, and, I swear, the fortieth showing of "Voice of an Angel," little Jackie Evancho, who is a lovely child and who indeed sings like an angel, and who is being grossly exploited just the way Charlotte Church was (this kind of callous exploitation that all too often burns out potentially great talent before it has a chance to mature causeth me to lament loudly and rend my garments!), plus two-hour lectures on how to keep your brain healthy well into your nineties, along with frequent breaks offering you premiums for contributing, including a DVD of the program you are watching, which has been broadcast three times within the past two weeks!!

Which is why, instead of watching television lately, Barbara and I have been watching selected movies that we get from NetFlix and the Seattle Public Library.

Looking at the upcoming schedules of both stations—no Wagner in evidence!!

Seattle Opera put itself on the international map a few decades back when general manager Speight Jenkins stuck his neck out and mounted a local Wagner Festival with all four of the Ring operas. All four operas within a week! Complete with a mix of internationally known opera stars and some very good local talent (Babara Coffin, with whom I went to high school, was one of the Valkyries). Barbara (my Barbara) and I took in all four operas. The singing was great and the staging was spectacular! The four operas lasted a total of twenty hours! After four evenings, we were rump-sprung from sitting, but our ears were all a-glow!

The response was far greater than anybody anticipated. People came from all over the country—and from as far away as Australia—to take in Seattle Opera's Wagner Festival. And they're still running it every couple of years, I think, along with their regular schedule of five different opera productions per year (each opera given about five times over a couple of week period).

If this new Ring Cycle doesn't show up on our local PBS affiliates' schedules right soon, I'm liable to write a few letters!!!

Don (snarl!!) Firth

P. S. Bonzo3legs, take a listen to the tenor-baritone duet au fond du temple saint from "The Pearl Fishers," by George Bizet (who also wrote "Carmen") and try to tell me that opera is "hideous and pretentious." (Concert presentation: CLICKY)).

Or French soprano Natalie Dessay doing a bravura job of singing "Olympia's Song" from Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann. Dessay is portraying Olympia, a wind-up singing and dancing doll built by the toy maker Copelius, whom Hoffmann, for some reason, thinks is a real woman and he falls in love with her! I've seen Natalie Dessay in a number of performances, and although she can by very serious when the role calls for it, she has a real flair for comedy. (CLICKY #2).

Or Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky singing "Eri Tu?" from Verdi's "The Masked Ball," when his character thinks his wife and his best friend are having an affair. Hvorostovsky's voice is like dark chocolate! (CLICKY #3).

Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungs" is based on Norse Sagas. It's folklore!

In fact, for those who say that opera plots are "stupid," I would invite them to take a good look at the plots of their favorite ballads! I would go so far as to say that ballads are "mini-operas" and operas are "ballads on steroids."

Rarely do the composers actually write the plots of their operas. They take them from plays or novels, get a "librettist" to set the work into some manner of verse to which music can be written, then they set about actually writing the opera. "Carmen" came from a novel by Prosper Merimee. "Rigoletto" was a novel first, by Victor Hugo. "Il Trovatore" (the Troubadour) was written by a Spanish playwright and made into an opera by Giuseppe Verdi. "Lucia di Lammermoor" was based on Sir Walter Scott's "The Bride of Lammermoor." In some productions, the male members of the cast are running around on the stage in kilts.

And Elmore is right. An opera is a multi-media production. It's like paying to put on a play, complete with costumes and sets, plus not just actors, but people who can sing, and sing very well, often in foreign languages, and with voices big enough to make themselves heard over a full symphony orchestra, plus a whole symphony orchestra! Mounting an opera production is a mighty costly affair. Opera companies keep the ticket prices as low as they dare, because they WANT people to come to their productions.

And for each opera they put on, Seattle Opera manages to pack a 2,500 seat opera house for five nights running. The tickets are pricy, yes, but if they are to stay in business at all, much less make a profit, opera companies are pretty marginal operations. The idea that they price tickets high to keep opera "elitist," is just plain dumb!

(Where the hell do people get some of the nitwit ideas they get?)