Typical TOF Take

Parterre Box's La Cieca (James Jorden) writes:

Now, about the Met's plans for a tab version of Magic Flute in the Julie Taymor production. La Cieca says, "Oh, why the hell not?" Somehow La Cieca feels that a 90-minute, fast-moving entertainment is a lot closer to Mozart's original intention than the three-hour plus behemoth the Met delivers when they do the Gesamt version.

I suggest that if Mozart's original intention for Zauberflöte was to write a "90-minute, fast-moving entertainment," he would have written a 90-minute, fast-moving entertainment rather than what he did write: a transcendent, two-act, three-hour, Singspiel that's among the most sublime works of art in all of music. (See our take on the Met's plans for a "tab version" of Zauberflöte here.)

But when it comes to the operas of Mozart (as opposed to those of the Italians, and Don Giovanni perhaps excepted), considerations such as these are typically lost on most opera queens, almost all of whom are the very incarnation of the TOF* — one might even say they're almost the very definition of a TOF — and La Cieca (whose general knowledge of opera is encyclopedic, and justifiably provokes industrial-strength admiration) is certainly no exception. One can imagine (if one dares) La Cieca's response to a proposal by the Met (or any other opera company, for that matter) to mount a "tab version" of that perennial piece of quintessential operatic trash (or, in Joseph Kerman's infamous but felicitous phrase, that "Shabby little shocker"), Tosca. I daresay the ensuing breast-beating and howls of wounded sensibility and indignant outrage would be heard clearly as far distant as the outer reaches of Siberia or Mongolia, the topmost heights of Everest, and the utmost depths of the Mariana Trench.

What else is new.

*True Opera Fan. Like a teenage movie fan, only worse — much worse.