Once again, The Omniscient Mussel is coordinating a contest ripe for hilarity, #Operaplot 2010. Full rules are on the site, but in a nutshell, readers are invited to describe an opera's story using the length of a Twitter post, i.e., a maximum of 140 characters. Anyone with a Twitter account can enter (and it might be worth creating one just for this purpose). The top prize: two tickets to The Marriage of Figaro by the Opera Theatre Company (in Dublin), hotel accommodations for three nights, and up to 1,000 Euro toward airfare.
My favorite, one of the top five from 2009, neatly summarizes Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle: Here's my castle. Are you afraid? No, I'm going to open all those damn doors! Are you afraid? No, let me in! Who's that? Oh shit.
Miss Mussel wrote me a lovely little note, suggesting that some contemporary operas might show up to counterbalance all the Tweets about La bohème (funny as they may be). So take heart, fans of the operas of Henze, Lachenmann and Sciarrino: your votes are needed.
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