Beware Of The Buddhists

The Mahablog helpfully explains:

The German Opera of Berlin (Deutsche Oper Berlin) has pulled a production of Mozart's Idomeneo from its fall schedule on the advice of police. The production had included a scene featuring the severed heads of Mohammed, Jesus, and the Buddha, and the police worried that Muslims might get violent about it.

If you are familiar with Idomeneo you might wonder how Mohammed, Jesus, and the Buddha wandered into it, since those illustrious figures are not in the libretto.

As Insty would inject, "Indeed". The rightwingnuts, such as their leading slattern (at least according to Dictionary.com) have shown their real priorities here by denouncing the opera company for cancelling this gratuitous offense against Islam, even though it should be just as offense to Christians. For that matter, Mozart probably would sound a discordant note about this abuse of his work. Fortunately, this incident has not been a total loss, because it seems to have inspired the Mahablog to contemplate a possible future opera which I would love to see:

If anyone ever writes an opera about the Bush Administration (hey, there’s one about Nixon!), I foresee a scene in which a pile of shit is hauled into the White House (Josh Bolten: Osservi, un altro mucchio di defecazione!). Then Karl Rove appears with a shovel, promising to find the pony (Non si preoccupi! Posso trovare il piccolo cavallo!).

(By the way, I saw Nixon In China, which premiered right here in Texas. There was no pony in that one either. This new one could be more amusing, probably performed first outdoors at the summer music festival in Point Barrow or Thule after the residents of the temporarily more temperate latitudes kill each other off over vanishing food supplies when the warming Siberian methane traps let loose -- but I digress.)