Issue Date: March 9, 2003
Opera in the house
Learn the plots and lyrics before you arrive at the theater.
These sites are great for people who prefer Mozart to Mos Def.
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Anyone who's tried to figure out song lyrics has had a Ramona Quimby moment. The children's book character became fascinated with the phrase "dawnzer lee light" in "The Star-Spangled Banner", not realizing the words were actually "dawn's early light." Even more difficult than figuring out lyrics in one's own language, however, is figuring out those in another language, as any opera lover can attest. Now the Web can help you sing along -- and understand the plot -- when Plácido Domingo comes to town.
OperaGlass at opera.stanford.edu is the antithesis of a Franco Zeffirelli set: spare and unostentatious. But don't mistake simplicity for deficiency. The site takes what normally would be stacks of information and organizes it all more neatly than Melvil Dewey could. Although there's no search function, the site's alphabetical lists make it easy to find the plots, full lyrics and performance histories of most popular operas. You also could spend a good portion of your life skimming the index of more than 2,600 opera composers; it includes the titles of each one's works, and collectively, there are more than 15,000. Other indexes include the homepages of contemporary opera luminaries and fan pages.
If getting your opera information from a Stanford research scientist seems counterintuitive, check out OperaAmerica.org and OperaWorld.com, two sites run by Opera America that interlink with each other. Both sites publish up-to-the-minute contemporary opera news. The Broadcast Booth lists upcoming opera radio broadcasts, and a comprehensive search function finds schedules for opera performances from Aalborg, Denmark, to Zanesville, Ohio. Opera America also has information for opera professionals, but membership is required to access it.
These days, it can be challenging to prefer Mozart over Mos Def. Most people would rather discuss The Lord of the Rings than Wagner's Ring Cycle. But at least online, you can find information on Aida from people who know it's not just a Broadway musical.
-- Laura Shin
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My Web: Mark Cuban
Movers, shakers and their bookmarks
The road Mark Cuban took to become a billionaire businessman began with a garbage-bag-selling route. Teaching disco dancing and writing money-making chain letters also helped Cuban out, until he co-founded Broadcast.com, which showed sports events and Victoria's Secret fashion shows live on the Web. After selling the company in 1999 to Yahoo, Cuban had $2 billion and some ambition to spare. Three years ago, he bought the laughingstock of the NBA, the Dallas Mavericks, and turned the team into a powerhouse. He also co-founded HDNet, which claims to be the first high-definition national TV network. "The common ground between the Mavs and all my businesses has been treating new customers like the most important people in the world," he says.
Cuban's Web interests align perfectly with his business interests:
Dallasbasketball.com is where he reads about and discusses his favorite team.
He gets the latest news on home theaters and HDTV at avsforum.com.
The entertainment-savvy techie gets movie news from the trade publication The Hollywood Reporter online at hollywoodreporter.com.
An executive producer of Star Search, Cuban stays current on the contestants at cbs.com/primetime/star_search/index.shtml.
-- L.S.
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