Maybe it was one of his quips or paradoxes?!?

Barzun made me appreciate just how wittily written Shaw’s prefaces are, and also helped me to respect his critical judgments (Shaw was a superb and prolific reviewer). If he rated G&S so highly, he was likely to be right in an absolute sense. He really did understand comedy and the comic spirit.

Just on quality, it’s now got to the point that L’Orfeo is a complete sellout and the Edinburgh Festival organisers are warning punters about ticket touts. I figure an opera must be pretty damned good when the ticket touts start to emerge.

I’m an opera buff but I dislike the implication of ‘opera’ that somehow it’s all the same, or if you like some of the genre you have to like all of it. How like is Janacek to Britten? Not very!

I dislike Italian opera (unusual for a fan) with the exception of two or three of Puccini’s works. Verdi I love to watch for the spectacle, but the usual ‘DUM dum dum, DUM dum dum’ intro to his arias makes me tired — as do many of the arias.

The greatest operas are by Mozart — I don’t think it would be physically possible not to enjoy a good performance of The Marriage of Figaro. That said, poor performances can be an incredible turn-off. My wife and I took our 23 year old niece to a performance of Figaro by Opera Australia hoping to convert her. It was a shocker and probably put the poor girl off opera for at least a decade.

But by the same token the performance we watched last year in Vienna of Bizet’s Carmen I swear would have converted the most determined sceptic.

Opera is easy to get wrong and difficult to get right. But when it works there’s just nothing like it.

Agree with others on G&S. It’s almost the perfect match of words, wit and music. George Bernard Shaw rated it even higher than Wagner, I seem to recall.

Was it Orwell that said of late 19th century poets and lyricists like Gilbert that they mastered comic poetry, turning it into an extremely complicated and technical art. This might be true, though it’s also true that details of Gilbert’s poetry can be endlessly changed and rearranged to suit modern times - it’s as if it’s important to maintain the form of the poetry, while the message can be manipulated to suit the poet.

‘I am the very model of a modern major general’ has a claim to being the most rewritten song in existence. Wikipedia lists some of these parodies. There are many more.

Just on FDB’s point - I wonder if I believed L’Orfeo because it was about a singer. It wasn’t such a stretch to turn the whole exercise into song. I must admit the starving Bohemians plot with fat people playing the parts (up the thread) sounds like a pretty big stretch.

As with any art form, not all opera is good. But the best opera, in my opinion, is better than practically anything. JC is right about Puccini - Turandot can still give me goose bumps after hearing and watching it innumerable times.

As for fat ladies, they tend to come with the great voices. But it’s not all a turn-off. In Salome, for example, the star flashes her map of Tasmania in the dance of the seven veils. (It wasn’t until then that my wife understood why I take the binoculars.)

There was a Simpsons episode where Bart held the murderous Sideshow Bob at bay while he did a rendition of Pinafore? that went on long enough for the police to intervene and save him.