Now, the National Review was founded by a guy who wanted to brand AIDS patients' a$$es and forearms, so you can't really argue with what they deem fit to be printed in the magazine -- it's okay. Still, it's somewhat perplexing that they took the trouble to send a guy all the way to Forth Worth, in the beautiful State of Texas, in this era of budget cuts, to write a 389-word review of a new opera.
The magazine actually gave more space to the piece -- 1935 words. But Jay Nordlinger used up almost all of it to instruct the reader on the cruelty of Che Guevara and the perfidy of nowadays liberals. He only had a few paragraphs left to mention, in passing, that he actually went to the opera that night.
It sort of makes one nostalgic for the voice-obsessed opera reviewers who don't listen to -- or care, or know about -- anything but the voices, and who relegate the conductor -- who's just the person in charge of the whole show, after all -- to the last paragraph, out of courtesy, in a (short) sentence or so.
Re: William F. Buckley's ideas on the AIDS epidemic, one has to at least be comforted that, even if Reynaldo Arenas was indeed an AIDS victim, Nordlinger didn't mention government-mandated tattoo parlors in his review.