Love it, Lorna...there have been too many of "those" lately. Same with people who are bored with Shakespeare...

I'm not against innovation, but I think it's being carried to extremes...sometimes the music seems to get lost.

No, no, it's typical Zefferelli, very traditional, masses of extras, nothing to upset the horses - see Barbara's note above. Kasper Holten is about to retire the traditional ROH Bohème which has been around for about 30 years (and I'll be going to see Opera North's new Bohème next month - they're aiming to put on lots of performances and hoping to make lots of money from them. Times are hard in our conservative+so-called liberal democrat shrinking of the state).

Oh, I loved it, loved it, LOVED it! I know, I said the same thing about Werther, but that was puppy love and this is rhe Real Thing! That second-act set was fabulous. That familiar music just seemed warm and wonderful to me. I'm going to be hearing La Boheme in my head for the next six months.

I wonder if anyone ever said that about a Richard Strauss opera.

Actually, I've had an occasional Rosencavalier earworm...

I've seen ten of Strauss's 15 operas on stage, plus a couple of concert performances. My favourites are:

Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/1916)
Capriccio (1942)
Elektra (1909)
Arabella (1932)
Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918)
Die Schweigsame Frau (1934)

The other four:

Salome (1905) is sort of OK, but I don't want to see it very often
Intermezzo (1924) is rather bizarre
Daphne (1938) has its moments and I'd like to see it again

And then there's Der Rosenkavalier (1911) which has some nice music but is rather soppy. My favourite character is Baron Ochs!

Oh, and there's a lot of good orchestral music - the one I like best is An Alpine Symphony but the others (e.g. Metamorphosen)are good. And then there are a whole lot of songs (particularly the Four Last Songs) plus several concertos....

Kay, let me guess -- the waltzes?

of course the waltzes, but some of the arias, duets, trios...I had a mezzo friend in college who sang Octavian in a school production...got fairly familiar with the work at an early age, I guess.

My freshman year at Indiana University School of Music, I got thoroughly obsessed with Der Rosenkavalier. The opera theater was doing it (they prepared for it most of the year), and I attended most of the orchestra rehearsals and all of the performances. I was drunk on it, couldn't get enough of it. And I went on about it at most of the meals in the dorm too; my friends deserve a medal for being patient with me and not avoiding me during that period of infatuation.

I've seen regrettably few of the operas onstage (Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Frau ohne Schatten, plus Capriccio in concert -- from the BBC box at the Albert Hall!), several more on video, still others on recordings. I also love a great deal of the orchestral music (Don Quixote and Till Eulenspiegel at the head of the list), and many of the songs, especially those with orchestra.