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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   32504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I’m laying it on a bit thick there and I hope the above came across; it is a good thing that one of the most-enduring and well-loved operas being performed today occurred because… Mozart needed money, and outside of any commission, wrote an opera with the aim of it being a popular, commercial success. As soon as my daughter is old enough and possesses the patience to sit through it, I can’t wait to take her to see the Met’s annual abridged, English-language production it puts on every December that is designed to be child-friendly.

I read Death in Venice as an undergrad, and I wasn’t a great student, so I’m certain I procrastinated, rushed through it, and now don’t have much recall of it — broad strokes of industriousness versus leisure, the love drive versus the death drive, how our base desires conflict with good manners?

Maybe I'm a philistine but I found the music boring and my takeaway was that Britton was doing a poor retelling of Nabokov.

Opera at its best involves a dramatic heightening of human emotion. Small children often sing to themselves when playing to achieve just this. It is intrinsically in us; part of our souls. If a particular work doesn’t move you in this manner, feel no shame in casting it aside.

There is Britten I love — The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra - — and Britten I like — The Turn of the Screw — but if Death in Venice doesn’t resonate in your heart, then go with your heart.

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