Oh all right. Covent Garden here I come. (Will a panto do instead - now that's an art form I'm really interested in?)
But songs. Now I think you and I are going to get into a definitional disagreement here. For me a song is an inseperable conjunction of words and music. 'Song without words' is meaningless to me, as is the notion of a lyric that can be set to any music ("pick a score, pick any score").
By that token, from all I've heard of opera (and unless you know the original language, you must rely upon translations), the songs are genuinely awful - though you may want to present us with an example of operatic lyrics that are not embarrassing. If you can do so, I will drop my case. If you can produce an operatic lyric that is comparable with that of "Won't get fooled again" or "My way" or even "Blowin' in the wind", I will buy the ruddy CDs or whatever and immerse myself in the stuff. But without such proof (and I am granting the quality of the music alone beforehand), you are not going to convince me that what happens in operas can even be called songs, let alone good ones.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
ps. Are the high heels because you're not very tall?
