" It is sobering to think that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead a year." -- Tom Lehrer

Music Posting brevity tonight can be explained by the fact that I'm watching opera's Die Zauberflote or Mozart's The Magic Flute. It's a 1991 production recorded at The Metropolitan Opera House in New York with designs by David Hockney. I'm really quite enjoying it, probably because it has the atmosphere of a Christmas panto, including a fairy tale princess in the shape of Pamina and the comedy relief bird, Papageno (who might as well be called Buttons) and a fairly rubbish adventurer. So far, it's the fairly simple tale of the adventurer falling in love with said princess on the basis of a painting and then heading off to a castle to save her, with titular instrument and the anthropomorphic fowl to help his quest. As it stands they've been sent into some kind of punishment room and I best get back to see if they survive...