Maniacs Of Music

Click for a better jpeg.

Although I've never understood jazz (in all of its variety, a complex form of music), I could probably understand jazz fanatics, because I, too, am fanatical. Many of us in the "classical" world are wild-eyed maniacs, always in search of that elusive live bootleg CD of Klemperer and the Orange County Abbatoir Philharmonic performing the undestroyed Sibelius Eighth, or of Reiner's doubly rare phonebooth recording of the Scriabin "Scratch 'n' Sniff" Concerto.

But for unbridled rabid devotion, nobody, no human being, can match an opera fan. Even baseball fans, with heads full of batting averages that go back a century, are no match for opera fans, with heads that go back to Monteverdi.

Opera fans are the Star Trek fans of the music world, and their well-stocked brains, like an Escher print, twist and recoil back and forth in tunnels that no sane lover of sound could imagine.