I woke up at 7 am and, on a mission, trudged bleary-eyed to my laptop.
"Can I make you some coffee?" my dear one said as I passed his office. Yes, I said, ever grateful for his daily miracle of Perfect Coffee Production.
Laptop on, I went directly to minioperas.org to see the results of the second phase of the contest: the composition.
The screen came up, and I screamed just a little bit: three (THREE!) of my favorite minioperas made it to the final round of competition. THREE LINGERERS!
(And now, for a moment of silence for my other favorites that found their way into my dreams and my daydreams for weeks but didn't make the finals: your magic is not done. I hope to hear you elsewhere. There were a few particular composers whose work I will follow closely from now on. Thank you for honoring me with your compositions of The Lingerer.)
Let me step out of my own (apparently enormous) ego for a moment and just say that there were so many--SO MANY--marvelous, brilliant compositions to all 10 of the librettos. If you haven't already, you won't regret visiting the website and listening to them.
Here's one more thing I need to admit: sometimes I lose faith a little in the basic goodness of humanity, especially when tragedies such as the Colorado shooting or, yesterday, the Wisconsin Sikh tragedy occur. I lose faith amid the muck of politics and ignorance. After the media coverage of the Aurora shooting, I listened to the compositions at the minioperas website, one after another, and somehow they were like a poultice to the pain. As if they were telling me: if humans are compassionate enough to make music like this, there is hope for us all. It sounds really corny here now as I'm tying it, but there you go. This music helped me profoundly, and I'm thankful for it. Better to get hope from opera than from a prescription bottle.
Congratuations, finalists! You deserve heaps of applause. (And a special hurrah to Max Perryment, Alex Weston, and Julian Chou-Lambert.)
Everyone else, get your video cameras charged and ready: the film competition begins NOW! You have 49 days to git 'er done.
