In the film Play It Again, Sam, Woody Allen’s character (Allan) is trying to get over his ex wife. Allan’s friend Linda (Diane Keaton) manages to arrange a blind date for him. Giddily anticipating the night with all its pleasures and possibilities, Allan chortles with excitement, “Ooh, I really have mixed feelings about this!” That’s exactly how I felt when I first perused this year’s Metropolitan Opera HD Live Broadcast lineup. The pleasures and possibilities of early 18th century to late 20th century fare, from Handel to Glass with Mozart, Gounod and Wagner in between are enough to fill any opera fan with both anticipation and dread. Fiercely Anticipating, Kinda Wanna See, Wouldn’t Go If You Paid Me. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. But which is which? Opera for me is anything but Hegelian. The elusive Gesamtkunstwerk, that perfectly synthesized (yet elusive) all-embracing art form that opera strives to be, is more Janusian in nature to me. The Roman god Janus is often represented by a two-headed man, eyes gazing in opposite directions. He is the god of transitions in time and of beginnings and endings, of doors and gates. And like an electron exhibiting both wave and particle traits, able to be in two different places at once. Opera fans are forced to hold not just like and dislike but adoration and disgust in our hearts simultaneously. I’ve seen many of the operas on offer here before. What follows is my excitement, worry, concern, fierce anticipation, lukewarm skepticism, dread… general anticipatory ambivalence about the upcoming productions. The four part, 19-hour opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, of which Siegfried is the third part, is one of the highest artistic achievements of mankind, rivaled perhaps only by Ricky Gervais’s The Office or Mitchell and Webb’s Peep...

FIERCELY ANTICIPATING The Difficulty of Crossing a Field – Long Beach Opera I’ve seen a hundred-someard operas. Some were great, some were mediocre (or became mediocre in the hands of mediocre direction and/or design), and many were awful. I left the recent Long Beach Opera production of Moscow, Cherry Town at intermission vowing to stick to Shostakovich’s string quartets and symphonies. True, LBO budgets preclude those epiphanic experiences available at the Metropolitan Opera in New York where just the curtain rising on any Zeffirelli production is enough to fill you with awe and appreciation. But, to be fair, I’ve also walked out on my share of Metropolitan Opera productions – the most recent being John Adams’s Doctor Atomic. It stunk; but the clincher was that the Jets were playing the Patriots that night and it was on TV at O’Neals’ across the street. So, the search for the great American opera is still on, as it is for the great American novel (Huckleberry Finn falls apart at the end and I can’t seem to get a consensus on Philip Roth’s audaciously titled baseball book, The Great American Novel.) This month, Artistic and General Director Andreas Mitisek’s semi-experimental opera company presents the short David Lang piece, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, written in the early aughts of this century. Lang is a co-founder of the Bang on a Can contemporary music festival in New York which has presented iconoclastic composers and performers such as Arnold Dreyblatt (whose 20-note octave is based on nature’s overtone series), Michael Gordon, Evan Ziporyn, Steve Reich, et al. Interesting company Lang keeps. I have high hopes for The Difficulty of Crossing a Field in which Lang supposedly combines opera with other theatrical techniques. Field is based on the Ambrose...