Maybe La Boheme was like this–if so, it’s also stupid. (D. Aviva Rothschild, Bursting With Song)
This statement is so unutterably ignorant that I’m just going to wait second for the sheer enormity of it to sink in.
Okay. Granted, given Aviva’s reaction to the epic emotionalism of Les Miserables (which, while not an opera, is designed to play like one) and the fact that she genuinely believes Sweeney Todd is an opera, her ignorance of the genre is well-established. Still, the fact that she’s willing to dismiss one of the greatest works of music drama in history sound unheard because she didn’t like a musical that was extremely loosely based on it is ridiculous. No, don’t do any research before running your mouth off—after all, you’re only an amateur critic. I think what appalls me most about this sentence is that it actually assumes there is the possibility of a legendary Classical masterpiece like La Boheme being ‘stupid’. There are some works that are canonized to such a degree that insulting them automatically makes you look like an ignorant rube, and by the time she wrote this, La Boheme was one of those things. I’ve never read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but I know it’s a great work of art, and I’m not going to go around suggesting it might be a piece of crap just because I don’t have firsthand knowledge of it. Why, that would make me look like a complete and utter imbecile! Oh, wait…
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