Dear David
All of us at Bachtrack had lots of fun reading your piece “Take your seats for a fight at the opera”. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a good spat, and seeing as we’re not exactly a giant media conglomerate, we always appreciate getting a mention from the great and the good.
As for me, I’m all in favour of riff-raff, whether the term means “people who don’t agree with me on matters of high cultural significance”, “people who prefer hip-hop to opera” or “the great unwashed” (or your other favourite form of patrician abuse). The more of them we get into concert halls and opera houses, the better.
But there’s a pretty clear strand running through your piece that I have to take issue with: the fact that you can’t conceive of finding opera anything other than stultifyingly dull. The thing is, your “irrational fear of hours and hours of boredom” isn’t merely irrational – it’s just plain wrong.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of boring opera. There’s also plenty of boring jazz, rock, theatre, film, football games, TV and – dare I say it – comedy. And since our multi-channel world gives us access to the very best of all these things, we’ve become all the more intolerant of the bad stuff. But just because there are a lot of dire comedians, it doesn’t mean that *all* comedy is boring.