So. If someone writes a story and it is set to music in order that people can sing the story and then you put the characters in costume and make-up and give them some structured direction as to how they should move around the stage while the singing is going on, then you have opera, right? Well, not necessarily is the answer to that question. I realised this as I was watching Saturday's HD transmission from the Met of Berlioz' Le Damnation de Faust. This is not a piece I was in any way very familiar with. It would seem to be a work which gets its fair share of concert performances but is rarely seen on the stage. Perhaps this should have been a hint. I have heard extracts from it being played on the radio from time to time but I think that's about it. I hadn't even bothered to read up on it at all before I went to the movie house. I know the Faust legend from the play by Goethe and I am familiar with all the Berlioz concert hits so I knew what to expect in a musical sense; I have seen the opera Faust by Gounod and I assumed - quite wrongly as it transpired - that I had a better than fair idea of what I was going to see.

The Scene: A garret in Vienna in 1814. It is morning. The composer Ludwig van Beethoven sits by a desk at which he has apparently just awoken . The door opens and a servant enters. It is Ernst Jeeves, Beethoven's manservant and confidant. His clothes have seen better days but he is obviously anxious to remain as presentable as his penury will allow. He places a cup of coffee on the desk next to Beethoven.

Beethoven(yawning): Morning, Jeeves.

Ernst Jeeves: Good morning, Sir.

Beethoven (cupping his ear with his hand): What? Speak up man!

E.Jeeves (raising his voice): Good morning, Herr Beethoven!

Beethoven: Mmm. Yes. Well.. No need to shout, Jeeves. Another fine day, is it? Lark on the wing, snail on the thorn and all that nonsense?

E.Jeeves: Quite so, sir.

Beethoven: What have we got on the agenda for today?

E.Jeeves: This morning, sir, you told me you planned to write an overture for your opera Fidelio.

Beethoven: What? Another one? I thought I had written three of the blighters already!

E.Jeeves: As I understand you to have told me,sir, none of the others was quite...umm..satisfactory, sir.

After a fitful night wherein I managed to cram only about four hours of solid shut-eye I arrived shortly before 9am at the Lloyd Center Regal movie house for saturday's showing of John Adams' Doctor Atomic. You may have gathered from my previous posts that this was not at the top of my list of things I really wanted to do today. As I slouched unwillingly across the parking lot I was not encouraged by there being only one - count 'em - one person in line waiting for the doors to open. Normally there would be around fifty patrons waiting their opportunity to grab their popcorn and coffee before stampeding the auditorium to grab the prime seats. As I chatted with the theater manager while I set up my table he informed me that they had pre-sold around two hundred tickets and by the time the lights dimmed there were probably about three hundred bottoms in seats. Many of these were people I see at almost every Met show. We have come to know each other a little now and I enjoy seeing them and discussing with them what they are about to see.

Let me admit forthwith that my lack of enthusiasm for this performance was based on my prejudice against John Adams and his body of work which I considered dull, repetitive and bland.

I am sure that pretty much all of you will at one time or another have read the phrase just under my picture on this page "cries easily and frequently at opera performances". And so I do. I don't often cry at election results be they Presidential or otherwise but this week, you may have noticed, was special. I cried on Tuesday evening as I sat with my 'roomie' and a friend of his watching MSNBC on my computer when Barack Obama's delegate count in the electoral college passed the all-important 270 mark. There were actually many reasons I wept but chief among them was that at long, long last, for American children of whatever ethnicity or skin colour in one triumphant moment in time the phrase "Yes, we CAN!" suddenly really came to mean something. I understand that to realise that dream a potential candidate must still be born in the USA and that we are not any time soon going to have to become accustomed to the term "President Schwarzenegger" but given all the other ramifications of the election result I can live with that.

I have been in bed most of the last three days with a rather miserable cold.  I'll try to have a post up here tomorrow but in the meantime it's lots of hot soup and sleep for Operaman.