Posted 1:07 PM by Gene

Terry Teachout boasted for months in his blog about the opera he was writing, and it finally premiered three weeks ago -- to unanimous pans. As Vietnam and Wall Street demonstrate credentials will not inoculate people from their incompetence. But then critics may be beyond creative work because their knowledge of nuts and bolts robs them of inspiration. (We do not exclude Shaw, whose plays are often little more than glorified debates.) We further say English is not meant for opera, being a blunt declarative language; the music needs the rolling R's and the luscious L's and the accent graves to pump up the passion. As for the work proper, the most damning comment wasn't about the laughter from the audience greeting Terry's bald lines; it was that Paul Moravec's music was content to lurk in the background, as it often does with modern operas. This is a fate worse than oblivion. As if to underline this adaptation was less than necessary one critic noted that the 1940 Warners production of the Somerset Maugham source matter had music by Max Steiner, who quite ably wrote opera without words.

I'm not sure what "one of the least filled houses in my experience at Santa Fe" means except its author is very capable of being a blogger, and possibly more so of writing in a newspaper. (He freelances for The Daily Kaplan.)