Monday, January 21, 2008

Opera and Golf once more

Mizunogolf, it appears, is the user name of a member at Yahoo answers. This is the second time I’ve had occasion to visit this site recently, and on both occasions it’s turned out to be a rather odd experience. Mizuno is actually the trade name of a type of golf club, and I suppose it’s legit to name yourself in some connection with Mizuno golf, as though this was somehow a link from your life to those inanimate objects that are used to hit other inanimate objects. What does it say about Mizunogolf? Curious.
A while ago I wrote a couple of posts about opera and golf. To my surprise I found that there was actually an American opera called Il Giocatore (don’t ask why it has an Italian name), though it can hardly be said to be well-known, and that in another equally unwellknown opera Apollo 14, the game of golf is played on the moon. Yes, well. (I wrote the posts back in August, if you want to check them out. Just put ‘golf’ in the search engine at the top.)
It’s always fun to check out odd combinations in the Google search engine. After writing the above, I thought I’d try and see if any other golf/opera combinations turned up. One blogger said, ‘20 years from now I’ll probably be writing rock operas about golf or something…’, and in a review of the Opera San Jose’s production of Don Pasquale, the writer says: ‘There's a reason why opera buffs are just as fanatic about their sport as golfers are about theirs: like golf, opera is simply not perfectible. It's a zero-sum game of different disciplines--vocal, orchestral, theatrical, visual--all fighting each other for scraps.’
He then goes on to tell us that the producer made the tenor run up a flight of steps just before his top note, and the soprano had to perform a puppet play while singing one of those notorious full of flight Donizetti arias. Hmm.

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