About Opera

Extract

We have not been so annoyed by a tendentious pronoun since Vaughan Williams used it in “Do we want to hear old music as its composers intended?”, for WE regard Cosi as Mozart's loveliest score, with its exquisite serenade-band trellised by the strings and its wealth of vintage lyricism; not even poor productions and bad singers have yet turned it into a long evening for US. Beethoven thought that Mozart wasted musical riches upon the improbable and immoral, but we excuse the narrowness of genius when it may be responsible for the ethical rapture of the best parts of Fidelio. (An improbable and immoral work, WE think. Speech days and open days arranged by prison authorities just to indulge a taste for choruses? And what a scurvy treatment of the lower sort of people! How these lofty democratic puritans kow-tow to the nobs!) WE do not share Mr. Kerman's moral values, and as he is not Beethoven we merely want to smack him when he is rude.