Pleasantly surprised to find an intelligent and thoughtful description of Italian comic opera on the front page. I find much to agree with much of the author's

Pleasantly surprised to find an intelligent and thoughtful description of Italian comic opera on the front page. I find much to agree with much of the author's thoughts, possibly because of our shared reading of critics like Tovey and Rosen. Opera has always been the most (and at times, the only) popular genre of Western literate music, and its absurdities are also legendary. Charles Rosen gave a very good summary of the spectacle of opera in the nyrb titled "The ridiculous & sublime"[1], and I recommend it for those who cannot understand how people can become obsessed by something so patently silly. The reputation of Mozart's three Da Ponte operas, along with The Magic Flute, are uniformly high and any ranking would come down to personal preference. Speaking as someone who is decidedly not an opera buff, it's the ostentatiously showy parts (the fugal exposition and chorale prelude pastiche in the magic flute; the three orchestras playing dances in different meters simultaneously in Don Giovanni; and of course the marvelous ensemble numbers which make up the act finales) which attracts me to Mozart operas. These displays of compositional virtuosity are sadly lacking in his Italian successors. Some devotees of pure instrumental music may occasionally sneer at comic opera and consider it frivolous. This is undeserved since the rhythms of comic opera underly the classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The remarkable thing isn't that Mozart wrote great Italian comic operas as a German, but that he wrote much of his pure instrumental music as if they were comic opera. [1]https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/04/22/the-ridiculous-sublime/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/04/22/the-ridiculous-s...