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...