I've abandoned the great Mozart opera listen-through project from the back end of last year. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and bore reasonable fruit in terms of getting to grips with the first three on the list, but, for reasons that escape me, I just couldn't do Don Giovanni justice after making a start on the opening. Will resume some time this year - I hope. The thing is that I came to realise I was puritanically depriving myself of listening to other operas on the grounds that somehow I should be listening to Mozart. A bit crazy, no?
Anyway, today I bunged on Britten's Paul Bunyan - not exactly an opera, I know, but close, as an operetta, I suppose - and was pleasantly surprised by just how current Britten and, of course, Auden's concerns now appear. They wrote the piece around 1941, when the USA's sense of itself was in some doubt/debate and the (almost) final words of the giant lumberjack especially jumped out at me: Everyday America's destroyed and re-created, / America is what you do, / America is I and you, / America is what you choose to make it.
I suppose the same is true of any nation at any time, but in some circumstances the notion seems desperately relevant.
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