· Fuck and its variants (e.g. 'fucking,' 'motherfucker,' etc.): 65
· Asshole: 30 (N.B.: Stern's call-in number contains this word.)
· Bullshit: 14
· Shit: 13
· Cunty: 10
· Bukkake: 9
· Pussy: 8
· Cock: 7
· Bitch: 3
· Tits: 2
· Goddamn: 2
· Cum: 1
· Boner: 1

—Matt Haber

For Mr. Pavarotti's farewell appearance as Mario Cavaradossi in Tosca , the red velvet barn was turned into something of a rock arena. Patrons were allowed to bring in cameras, with the result that the grimness of Puccini's darkest opera (and Franco Zefirelli's opulently gloomy production) was enlivened by the hissing and twinkling of flashbulbs. During the final, endless curtain calls, a red banner reading "We love you, Luciano" was unfurled across the Dress Circle, and parents led children down the aisle as if hoping to burn into their memory the tenor's megawatt grin.

Sadly, the Met was less festive in the casting of Mr. Pavarotti's last hurrah: Both the Tosca of Carol Vaness and the Scarpia of Samuel Ramey were painfully wobbly, as if foreshadowing other retirement evenings to come. In the pit, James Levine, who had conducted Don Giovanni in the afternoon, seemed to be phoning it in. But after Mr. Pavarotti took that final curtain call, what was left in the air was not his bewhiskered grin but the sound of that inimitable honeyed voice. It may have frequently faded to near inaudibility; it could only be produced from a seated position (with a glass of water nearby). And it never quite attained the golden power of its youth. Nonetheless, what we heard, in all its penetrating ease and eloquence, was incomparably Pavarotti . At 68, the most beloved tenor since Caruso still possesses the world's most recognizable voice-the one we can virtually see in its gleaming, aphrodisiac nakedness.

Ms. Mattila's Salome is an aphrodisiac of another order-the dream-seductress whose charms suddenly turn so ghastly that you wake up in a cold sweat. Strauss' adaptation of Oscar Wilde's dramatic poem, in which incest, volcanic adolescent sexuality and religious fanaticism collide in an act of unspeakable depravity, was shocking when it had its premiere, in Leipzig, in 1905. (It was banned for 27 years at the Met, after its first American performance in 1907 aroused the ire of J.P. Morgan's daughter.) But it has never seemed more shocking than it does in the Met's new production by the German director Jürgen Flimm.

Mr. Flimm, who gave the Met a powerfully reimagined Fidelio in 2000, chose not to set this Salome at King Herod's court in biblical Judea, nor in some Surrealist dreamscape à la the famous Peter Brook–Salvador Dalí production of 1949, nor in the crypto-Fascist world of the Nikolaus Lehnoff staging for the Met, in 1989. Instead, he and his designers, Santo Loquasto (sets and costumes) and James Ingalls (lighting), have gone straight to the Pandora's box in which so many of our most deliciously depraved fantasies have incubated-Hollywood. We are in a cartoonishly contrived Middle East-half artificial sand dunes that might have been borrowed from The Road to Morocco , half glitzy palace of a tackiness unworthy of a Holiday Inn in Abu Dhabi. A dinner party of bored Beautiful People assembled by Herod (a stolid Allan Glassman, who on opening night substituted for an indisposed Siegfried Jerusalem) and his wife, Herodias (an equally stolid Larissa Diadkova), is in progress. The Prophet Jochanaan (Albert Dohmen in a robust début) is ranting against this ungodly lot from his unseen cell in a cistern under rickety scaffolding. As time goes by, the only visually ominous element becomes a group of figures on the horizon wearing face-obscuring black robes and white wings-"angels in purdah" was my best ecumenical guess.

Into this disingenuously goofy setting (today's avant-garde German directors specialize in this sort of compounded irony) arrives opera's ultimate Bad Girl, the party wrecker par excellence. She's a glamorous blonde in slinky satin-Jean Harlow out for trouble. It's clear from her suggestive sashaying about that she herself has seen too many Harlow films, and our first response is to laugh at such a familiar icon of lowdown libido on the loose. But it's a measure of Ms. Mattila's fearless identification with this awful tart that we become inexorably, utterly appalled. Gradually, we realize that the production's ingenious conceit is inspired by the opera's most famous scene-the "Dance of the Seven Veils," for which Ms. Mattila becomes Marlene Dietrich in male evening drag, executing (according to Doug Varone's choreography) a wicked parody of cheesy, high-stepping eroticism.

If this production of Salome is about anything, it's about stripping. It layers veils of Hollywood kitsch onto Strauss' (and Wilde's) kitsch-the better to shock us with the Bad Girl's ultimate unveiling. True to Strauss' feverish score (which was rather over-feverishly conducted by a reckless Valery Gergiev), this took place after Ms. Mattila had disrobed, fleetingly, down to her birthday suit, before allowing herself to be covered with a simple black garment. Then-when the executioner emerged from the cistern brandishing the Prophet's head-she really went to work.

I have never, in more than 40 years of opera-going, experienced anything as shattering as this magnificent singer's frenzied monologue of demented lust. Matching her own beautifully crazed movements with every bar of Strauss' beautifully crazed music, she brought herself to a state of physical and vocal ecstasy that was so powerfully sustained as to make us complicit in the character's madness. When it was all over, when Ms. Mattila reappeared onstage to a thunderous standing ovation, I realized that what we felt was not just the satisfaction of seeing a fascinating character revealed. We had witnessed, even more thrillingly, an unforgettable musical and dramatic creation-art laid bare.

In return for opening its doors to this bash, the Met reportedly earned $1 million, while depriving its next-door neighbor of uncalculated but much-needed box-office revenue, especially from elderly opera patrons who are unaccustomed to buying their tickets through the Internet. (A further insult took place a few blocks away on Columbus Avenue, where the police stopped singers and musicians who were trying to get to a rehearsal.) For choosing to hold their wingding at the world's most prestigious opera house, the MTV people received front Arts-page publicity in The Times , which reported on the event as a happy conjunction of high and low.

But, quite apart from what seems to have been yet another instance of the Met's cavalier attitude toward its weaker but invaluable sister, the barricading of Lincoln Center on behalf of a brash outsider was anything but happy. Once again, a venerable cultural institution was cozying up to an institution of the popular media whose interests couldn't be more divergent.

If the Met is about the cultivation of a tradition-steeped art form, MTV is about the selling of the latest rocker and rapper. And though in this case the Met's behavior was more a matter of greed than of artistic reach, it raised a question that won't go away: Why are the older stewards of high culture so desperate to appropriate the juvenile idiocies of low culture?

This question is too complex to answer here, but it speaks to the most distressing operatic experience I've had in some time, which took place at this summer's Salzburg Festival. As has been widely reported, Gérard Mortier, the outgoing artistic director of what is still the world's most glamorous summer arts gathering, has been virtually run out of town for turning the event into a showplace for Europe's most self-indulgent directors, who are at the forefront of what is known as Regiemusic , or director's opera. In my experience, Mr. Mortier's record is, at worst, highly uneven. Coming after the haute-dinosaur years of his predecessor, Herbert von Karajan, his commitment to contemporary and historically neglected opera has been commendable, and he has pulled off a number of unforgettable stagings, including those of Rameau's Les Boréades , Busoni's Doktor Faustus and Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin. But there have been some awful examples of wretched excess, especially in his rough-and-ready approach to the town's favorite son, Mozart. At this summer's affair (Salzburg-goers dubbed it "Mortier's revenge"), he outdid himself by throwing mud at two operas that are especially dear to Austrian hearts, Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus and Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos .

I cannot report firsthand on the outrages of Die Fledermaus, which reportedly turned the blithe Hapsburgian antics of its Viennese aristocrats into a grim orgy of incest and cocaine-sniffing, but they prompted even the most Regie-battered veterans of Salzburg to ask for their money back, the first time that this has happened in the festival's 80-year history.

"This is a blow to our national spirit, and it's not even entertaining," a sophisticated Austrian gentleman who had joined a considerable number of walkouts told me.

But I saw Ariadne– as well as a highly respectable, beautifully sung Don Carlo –and I can report that even after a second viewing, it seemed as willfully nonsensical an evening as I have spent in an opera house. If any opera invites deep musings on the conflict between "high" and "low," it is Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hoffmanstahl's deliciously awkward conjoining of rude commedia dell'arte with lofty opera seria. And since the two traditions happen to collide at the house of "the richest man in Vienna," who has commissioned a new serious opera by a brilliant young composer, only to want it leavened by low comedy, Ariadne must have seemed the ideal vehicle by which Mr. Mortier could tweak the well-heeled Austrians who have turned Salzburg into such an occasion for bourgeois self-display. How clever it must have seemed when the directing team of Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito had the idea of updating the whole thing to today, and setting it in the very place where all those overdressed operagoers would be collecting, the Grosses Festspielhaus.

And so, when the curtain opened on the prologue, we found ourselves in some backstage holding pen of the opera house. So far, so clear, ironically speaking. But then the performers and the Composer were pushed onstage, blindfolded. But why the blindfolds (which they seemed to be wearing without duress)? And why, as things developed, were we being asked to attend to some of Strauss' most beautiful music, as sung by the hapless Composer, while the tenor was stripping down to his boxers and contending with a Zerbinetta who was performing a lewd bump-and-grind under his nose? "Subversion!" a man near me whispered.

When the curtain opened on the opera proper, we were still in the same backstage area, only now it had been furnished with club tables and chairs and a well-stocked cocktail table, next to which the sleeping Ariadne sprawled, looking as though she hadn't been abandoned by Theseus but had passed out after one too many. The three nymphs were charwomen cleaning silver while they chirped about Ariadne's grief. Ariadne, upon awakening, tippled. On came Zerbinetta, miniskirted, bare-midriffed and high-booted, followed by her loutish clowns, a grunge band from the Austrian equivalent of Seattle. They gleefully groped her. (One had a fetish for her panties, another for her boots.) Bacchus entered, a mod Liberace in shiny silver suit and red T-shirt. To celebrate his transforming moment with Ariadne, he threw seat cushions in the air. And when their ecstatic duet had died away, the two lovers sailed not into the sunset, as Hoffmanstahl directed, but in different directions: Araidne alone into the street; Bacchus, through a door marked "Privat" with Zerbinetta. "More subversion!" the man whispered.

Silliness was a better word for it. For only later, when I talked to Susan Graham, who sang a glorious Composer, did I learn that the blindfolding was meant to convey the "terror"–she said this ironically– "that artists feel when they go into an alien bourgeois world." And only then did I learn that the people singing Ariadne (a patchy but strong Deborah Polaski), Bacchus (a promising American tenor of Helden proportions, John Villars) and Zerbinetta (the drop-dead Natalie Dessay) were not supposed to be the same people we had met in the prologue. Hmmm. Perhaps the only truly "blindfolded" person present was the conductor, Christoph von Dohnanyi, whose reading of Strauss' great score with the Vienna Philharmonic was ravishing. A few days later, I heard Mr. Mortier deliver an elaborate apologia for his dead regime. My command of German isn't good enough to convey the nuances of how he justified the Fledermaus and the Ariadne to a packed audience, but at least three times he compared what he had been up to with the Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut . If this was an attempt to ally himself with a subversive master in another medium, it was–given the fiasco of Kubrick's last film–a bad choice. But it did remind me of the true and beautiful subversiveness of Mr. Dohnanyi, who could only have conducted that Ariadne with his eyes wide shut.

also heading in that direction offstage. We were in the second scene of Lucia di Lammermoor , which tells of a

Scottish damsel driven mad by a feud between her brother and her lover, when

the wind began howling and the rain began blowing into the Santa Fe Opera

House, whose sides are open to the surrounding sierras. Plastic head coverings

were put on; jackets were pulled tighter; and yet nobody stirred to leave. A

riveting young German soprano named Alexandra von der Weth was making her

American debut in the title role, and as she sang to her maid about

premonitions of doom, the typically volatile weather conditions on an August

night in the mountains of northern New Mexico

and Donizetti's relentlessly soaring and crashing music seemed to spur each other

on. In the end, of course, it was no contest. The wind and the rain came and

went and came again. But nobody gave it a thought. All around me were cold,

damp people oblivious to everything except the playing out of Lucia's

forebodings. Once again an opera, performed to the hilt, had rid the universe

of everything but itself.

This has been an exceptional summer for opera in the

elements. In Cooperstown, N.Y., on the shores of Lake Otsego, the Glimmerglass

Festival has had its most artistically satisfying season in years, producing four operas of widely different periods and styles

with invigorating panache: Chabrier's 19th-century French farce, L'Étoile ; Mozart's Enlightenment

masterpiece, Le Nozze di Figaro ;

Britten's World War II reworking of classic tragedy, The Rape of Lucretia ; and Handel's comic Baroque extravaganza, Agrippina . For me, the high

point was Britten's first mature, seldom-performed

opera, a musically patchy but powerful work that revisits an ancient tale of

macho violence from the perspective of a war-battered couple in mid-century England.

Christopher Alden's production neatly merged past and

present with a set divided between bleak Notting Hill domesticity and stark,

golden-lit Roman pomp, and a staging that allowed the strong principal players-Michelle

De Young in the title role; Nathan Gunn as her predatory abuser, Tarquinius;

and William Burden and Christine Goerke as the modern-day Chorus-to show

themselves as standard-bearers for the next generation of keenly committed

American opera stars. Afterward, the work's descent into Christian moralizing

provoked considerable heat between those who found it offensive (why are so

many members of the American culturati put off by references to God?) and those

(myself among them) who replied, "Why can't we let Britten, who was a Christian

conscientious objector of unimpeachable conviction, be Britten?" In any case,

we had all been struck once again by the lightning bolt of an opera that would

not let us go untouched into the night.

A couple of weeks later, I found myself in Santa Fe, N.M.,

where there is an older-and far more heavily financed-adherence to the

seductions of summer opera. The Santa Fe Opera, which has been instrumental in

this once-sleepy hamlet's well-managed evolution into a mecca for sophisticated

tourists, getaway homeowners and art lovers, has entered a new phase in its

distinguished history. Having rebuilt the auditorium's seating area a few years

ago such that there is now a billowing canopy over the heads of everyone in

attendance, the company has acquired a new general director, Richard Gaddes,

who replaced his old boss, S.F.O. founder John Crosby.

For more than 40 years, Mr. Crosby, who recently turned 75,

had run the summer festival pretty much according to his own highly cultivated

tastes-an opera by Richard Strauss, his favorite composer, was obligatory-and

the loss of control has not been easy for him. During lunch one day at the

company's 50-acre complex a few miles out of town, I saw him sitting by himself

on the terrace outside the cafeteria, staring morosely into space and looking

like Napoleon on Elba. It was a sad sight, especially

since he has every reason to be gratified by the triumphs of his chosen

successor's first season.

I saw four of this summer's five productions-missing only Mitridate , one of Mozart's earliest

forays into opera seria -and three of

the four were exemplary stagings of well-established masterworks. (Despite

wonderfully assured conducting by John Crosby himself, the Strauss offering, Die Ägyptische Helena [ The Egyptian Helen ], was understaged and

badly cast, with a vocally and physically unalluring Helen in the soprano

Christine Brewer and an unmusical, bellowing Menelas in John Horton Murray.)

The summer's great crowd-pleasers have been Thor Steingraber's

uncluttered direction of Lucia and

Jonathan Miller's robust staging of Falstaff .

The former, vigorously conducted by Richard Buckley, was memorable for the

striking Ms. von der Weth, who has some of Joan Sutherland's chalky timbre in

her wildly uneven soprano, and the sterling Edgardo of Frank Lopardo, a veteran

tenor whose good looks, ringing tone and solid-if somewhat aggressive-command

of the bel canto style has, mysteriously, not translated into major stardom. Falstaff was distinguished chiefly by

the excellence in the title role of Andrew

Shore, an English baritone of

tremendous stage presence, who turned the old rogue into the wiliest sweetheart

imaginable, and the conducting of Alan Gilbert. Verdi's final masterpiece has a

score to challenge even the most experienced opera conductor-it must project a

personality of its own and yet be all of a piece with the vocal ensemble-but

Mr. Gilbert, who has had relatively little experience in the trade, kept

everything beautifully and incisively in play. The son of parents who are both

violinists in the New York Philharmonic, he is a young American maestro to

watch.

Of the half-dozen or so Wozzecks

that I have seen over the years, none has surpassed the Santa

Fe production, which was directed by an Englishman,

Daniel Slater, who was making his American debut, and conducted by Vladimir

Jurowski, a young Russian from St. Petersburg

who has been named music director of the Glyndebourne Festival. Despite its

reputation for "difficult" atonal music, Berg's adaptation of the brutally

stark play by Georg Büchner, about a hapless soldier who murders his faithless

common-law wife Marie, has proven to be a sure-fire stage vehicle since its

tumultuous premiere in 1925. Wozzeck is

opera in its most undiluted form: utterly direct in its emotional rawness,

unambiguous in its depiction of good and evil, and as immediately imprinting on

the ear and mind as a Goya cartoon.

This was a Wozzeck in

which everything worked. The production's visual inspiration seemed to be the

cruelly scarred, deep-perspective canvases of Anselm Kiefer: a light-shafted

barracks that transfigured itself into the settings of Wozzeck's downward

spiral-the doctor's experimental laboratory, Marie's dismal flat, the forest

pond where the fatal stabbing takes place. The faultless cast was led by the

Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard, whose Wozzeck was a

deeply disoriented Everyman with an untouchable core of nobility, and Anne

Schwanewilms, a German soprano with the sexuality and searing vocal colors

ofayoungHildegard Behrens, who made a sensational American debut as Marie. Mr.

Jurowski's taut, surely paced conducting gave the kaleidoscopic density of

Berg's score a lunar transparency: If this music hurt, as it must, there was

always the sense that it was happening in a dancing light. Most memorable of

all were the details of Mr. Slater's inventive stage directions: When Marie

read the Bible to her illegitimate little son (Austin Allen),

the boy hid himself under the bed. It was as vivid a depiction of an innocent's

awareness of how good entwines with evil as I have ever seen.

The radiant Ms. Bonney takes the center spotlight-along with the countertenor Andreas Scholl-in Pergolesi: Stabat Mater , an album of three works by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi that are ostensibly devoted to the mournful mysteries of the Virgin Mary, but are in fact devoted to showcasing the capacity of certain human voices to spin out the most exquisitely turned lamentations in seamless legato ( Stabat Mater , followed by two Salve Regina s, in F minor and in A minor; with Christophe Rousset conducting the ensemble Les Talens Lyriques; Decca 289 466 134-2). The famous Stabat Mater became nearly as popular as Cats in the 18th century, and hearing this performance of the delicately sorrowing work, one can understand why. The thin but ethereally pure soprano of Ms. Bonney and the woody, wonderfully affectless alto of Mr. Scholl don't so much entwine as melt into each other. The lean, piercing lines of Pergolesi, who was the Keats of composers (he died at the age of 26), make one realize, with a shock, how much we've lost on the level of sheer melody, when the most popular tune of our time has become that awful Andrew Lloyd Webber yowl called "Memory."

Aside from featuring antiheroes who are responsible for the deaths of boys-Boris Godunov becomes the czar of 16th-century Russia by ordering the murder of the throne's rightful heir, and the brutality of the Suffolk fisherman Peter Grimes brings his apprentices to violent ends-the two operas might seem to have little in common. What could be farther apart than Mussorgsky's sweeping chronicle of Russian despotism, mass suffering and international intrigue, and Britten's microscopic view of English villagers whose smug conformity crushes a prickly, independent loner? And yet seeing these two works on successive nights was to be reminded that Boris and Peter , despite their having been written 70 years apart in countries as different as Russia and Britain, might be described as the fraternal twins-the Castor and Pollux-in the operatic pantheon.

Both operas are among the few genuine tragedies in the modern repertory, driven by protagonists whose blind willfulness ends in madness and who are beset by that rarest of operatic emotions: guilt. Also unusual is the prominence each of them gives to the chorus. In Boris , the despot's rise and fall is mirrored at every turn by the longings and despair of the Russian masses who swarm the stage. In Peter Grimes , the East Anglian fisherfolk transcend their seeming banality to become as terrifying to us as they are to the paranoid title character.

Musically, both operas owe much of their immediacy and depth to the ingenious use of popular musical idioms-hymns, ballads, anthems-that are enveloped and heightened by bold-stroked tone-painting in the orchestra, which becomes so vivid as to make scenery almost superfluous. The later opera- Grimes was written in 1945-occasionally echoes the earlier one in what can only have been a deliberate borrowing, as it were, on the part of Britten. The most notable instance of this is in the staccato rhythms and quirky figurations in the third Sea Interlude, which immediately recall the clamorous opening bars of Mussorgsky's Coronation Scene.

Both of the Met productions are old-the Boris dates from 1974, the Grimes from 1967-and the former has aged badly. From the opening scene outside the Monastery of Novodevichy, near Moscow, we are in a folkloric, Socialist Realism greeting card (St. Basil's onion dome dangles from a wire). Richly costumed, the creaky design would have been unexcitingly tolerable if there hadn't been so many gaffes and missed opportunities in the staging: a clock that refuses to cooperate with Boris' terrible forebodings about time; a fountain that blocks the Pretender Dimitri from view; nonsensical comings-and-goings at the scaffold in Kromy Forest; and, most damaging, a deployment of the chorus as nothing more than a huddled mass, with the result that these poor kulaks had all the presence of an offstage choir.

Fortunately, the musical level was very high. Valery Gergiev, the charismatic maestro from St. Petersburg who is the Met's new principal guest conductor, was in the pit and he brought out all the telling dramatic detail in yet another "new" orchestration-by one Igor Buketoff-of Mussorgsky's problematic score. Despite a tendency to peter out at the end of several scenes, Buketoff's labors struck me, on first hearing, as a plausible middle course between the sometimes crude starkness of the original version and the splashiness of Rimsky-Korsakov's subsequent embellishments. Mr. Gergiev was joined by stalwarts of his Kirov Opera, whose linguistic ease and familiarity with their roles lent a wonderful authenticity of speech and acting style. In a uniformly strong cast, the standouts were Olga Borodina's voluptuous, alarming Marina, Vladimir Galouzine's gleaming-toned Grigory, and Sergei Leiferkus' steely, scheming Rangoni.

In such company, the American Samuel Ramey seemed something of an interloper in the title role. Mr. Ramey's trim athleticism and darkly elastic bass-baritone made for an unusually lithe Boris-his final tumble from the throne was a marvel-but he is an actor of stock gestures, "effective" rather than interesting. His was a by-the-book Boris-for the most part, a closed book.

By contrast, his brother in antiheroism, the Peter Grimes of Philip Langridge, was magnificently realized. In a role that is as inviting to interpretation as King Lear, the haggardly handsome British tenor eschewed, on the one hand, the titanic explosiveness of a Jon Vickers and, on the other, the aura of lost nobility of an Anthony Rolfe Johnson. His tormented fisherman was a brooding, dangerous, yet strangely sympathetic outsider-Al Pacino in a peacoat. Mr. Langridge's singing had a non-operatic crooning quality as though he were singing to himself, and his body language-coiled, crouched, ready to spring-was riveting.

He was in excellent company. Carolyn James' Ellen Orford seemed a bit stolid at first, but with her bright, top-heavy soprano she warmed up and delivered a strong, sweet performance of the schoolmistress, the only gleam of light in this grim affair. Alan Opie's Balstrode was gruffly attractive, and the chorus of townspeople-many of whom had perhaps been part of that faceless Russian mass-took on vibrant life. For once at the Met, each of the choristers had a distinct, human identity. The conductor was the British maestro David Atherton, an old hand at Britten, and he and his forces attacked this hallucinatory score with such whoosh and bite and rhythmic crackle that we might have been listening to one of Duke Ellington's swinging Harlem suites. This was one of those nights at the Met when everything clicked to thrilling perfection, and it was dismaying to see the house half-full. Why are New Yorkers so allergic to the works of one of the century's two greatest opera composers? One solution to the Met's Britten Problem might be to lower the ticket prices for his prickly operas, to bring in a younger, more adventurous crowd.

The century's other supreme opera composer was, of course, Richard Strauss, and the Met's first new production of the spring season introduced Capriccio , the composer's last work for the stage, to the house repertory. Straussians love this 1942 "conversation piece" as the summing up of the great man's long career, revolving as it does around an intellectual debate on the subject of Words versus Music, peopled with many of the operatic types who graced his previous music-dramas, from wistful aristocrats to Italian singers to knowing servants, and dressed up in music that wittily incorporates in-jokes to other composers (Gluck, Verdi, etc.) as well as to Strauss himself. Strauss initially thought of the piece as a curtain-raiser to one of his last mythological operas, Daphne , but was persuaded by his co-librettist, the conductor Clemens Krauss, to expand it into an evening-length one-act.

Even with the Met's intermission, an opera that consists of two hours and 40 minutes of back-and-forth about an issue whose resolution is clear from the outset-in opera, of course, the sovereign element is music-can become awfully tedious. I, for one, have always wished that Strauss had stuck to his original intentions. The Met's production, which was supervised by John Cox, is a pretty-looking party, attended by a fine ensemble of well-schooled and handsome guests, led by Kiri Te Kanawa as the beautiful, widowed Countess, the muse who ignites the debate. With Andrew Davis conducting, Strauss' delicately "talky" music was extremely well served. But, God, how it dragged.

There is a trend to make operas more accessible by moving the time in which they were set closer, but not too close, to the present. I don't buy this: If you're going to "update," then why not go all the way and update into the here-and-now? How is sense improved by imposing yet another historical layer on what is already historically layered? By shifting the party in Capriccio from the French Enlightenment to a 1920's Parisian drawing room, the Met's production made all the arguing about the merits of 18th-century opera reforms sound silly. Why were these people babbling on about Gluck and Couperin when, to all appearances, they should have been talking about Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev?

Things were made murkier by the decision to remove all mirrors from the opulent drawing room. The tricky business of mirroring-of words and music, of art and life-is what Capriccio is fundamentally about. When Kiri Te Kanawa, looking splendid in sequins and singing with greater radiance than I have heard from her in years, addressed the subject in the Countess' glorious closing monologue, she did so not to the mirror that is called for in the stage directions but directly into the auditorium. In front of her was a fire screen, its purpose being, I can only guess, to suggest that the invisible mirror over the invisible fireplace was us-the audience-gazing back at her. It was a familiar and, I'm afraid, not terribly helpful conceit-more "context," I suppose.