Well, time for another eulogy. Megacorporation ChevronTexaco has decided to pull the plug on their sponsorship of the Met opera broadcasts after next season, after a mere 63 years. To say this is a surprise would be to say you live in a cave, but it's still kind of sad. The corporate world, the music world, and certainly the advertising world are completely different now than they were in 1940, so I think rather than be shocked and angered by CT's decision to call it a day, we should rather be surprised that it lasted as long as it did. Did they really get their money's worth in recent years out of the $10 million or so they put into it every year? As the broadcasts went global, were people in other countries more inclinced to buy ChevronTexaco products as a result of the broadcasts. Even around here, there aren't that many Texaco stations around, and I wasn't inclined go out of my way to patronize them, even if they were cheap, which they aren't. The format of the broadcasts was extremely old-fashioned, also, in that it only allowed for 30 seconds of local station input between acts (and may times there's only one break), and yet the local stations had to pay money to carry the broadcasts, too. That prompted such forward-thinking stations as WCRB to dump them because they could make more money playing Bach and Mozart all afternoon and sticking in lots of commercials. So I hope that the Met can line up a new sponsor, and I hope they can come up with a format that makes the carrying of the broadcasts more palatable for both the sponsor and the stations (and the Met, too, although I don't know how much direct revenue the Met gets out of the deal now). The older I get and the more commercial recordings there are out there, both new and historical, the more live performance appeals to me, because there's that sense of immediacy that should be inherent in classical music but is missing from studio recordings. Even with inferior singers, I tend to prefer the Met broadcast renditions of certain operas because they can be interrupted by applause, laughter, etc., making you feel part of the performance. And it gives you the opportunity to listen to and discover both new operas (like "View from the Bridge" earlier this season) which haven't been commercially recorded yet, and lesser known operas (like "Giulio Cesare" from a few years ago) which you would never buy in the store. During the WCRB years I could tape the broadcasts off the radio and listen to them in the car. The timings in Opera News allowed me to get the right combination of tapes, although there'd be short pauses when the tape turned over and the intermission features tended to get truncated. Since even WCRB's signal was variable, not every tape came out that well (most are difficult to listen to with headphones because of the background hiss), but I've kept 40 or 50 of them that were worth repeated listenings. My favorite is probably Philip Langridge as Peter Grimes, which I like better than the Vickers recording. This past year I made several tries at recording the opera off the internet. The fidelity isn't as good, but there's no background noise (although there was one with quiet guitar music in the background for some reason). By transferring them to CD, you can preserve the intermission features and pick your own breaks in the music between CD's if necessary. But the internet connectivity can be spotty too, so there were a couple where the connection dropped in the middle and that was the end of that. But we've come a long way. Beth's dad used to record the opera by putting a microphone up to the speaker, and everyone had to be quiet for three or four hours in the middle of Saturday afternoon. So I hope the Met is able to do something to continue the broadcasts, because they are part of American culture, even if most Americans don't know it, and it would be one of those end of an era things to see them go.