Pastime with Opera Company

I see from Andrew Ross’ latest post to his The Rest is Noise blog that there is a competition to summarize opera plots in at most 140 characters (the size limit of a tweet).  This reminded me of the good old days when Mad Magazine was still clever enough to do some really funny things.  More specifically, I was reminded of the issue that was a parody of Reader’s Digest.  The condensed novel in the issue was Gone with the Wind.  The entire condensation (which seems appropriate to cite on the 75th anniversary of the book) was as follows:

“Fiddle-de-dee!”

BOOM!

There also used to be a vinyl label called Crossroads that had some very clever cover designs.  The one for Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung could easily count for a non-verbal summary of the entire opera (if not the entire Ring cycle).  It was a crumbling cookie.