1
'Twitter Opera' Wins Over Londoners
900 authors wrote Twitterdammerung libretto in tweets
By Matt Cantor
|
Posted Sep 7, 09 1:16 PM CDT
|
Share
(Newser)
–
The first-ever Twitter opera—a melding of high tech and high art with a libretto written in chunks of 140 characters—received an unexpectedly positive reception when it opened pver the weekend, the Washington Post reports. One critic called Twitterdammerung “an accident waiting to happen.” But it “was actually not that bad at all," wrote a Daily Telegraph critic.
The work of some 900 people who contributed to the text by tweeting lines, the opera was “actually watchable, listenable and rather funny,” critic Igor Toronyi-Lalic wrote. But he did cringe at the first line: “"It is a curious story—hear my tale,/Although my name was never Ishmael.” Characters include “a duck of destiny, a bird-infatuated nihilist,” and “a falsetto-singing ginger cat.” Though mainly “madness and messiness,” Twitterdammerung boasted “humor by the bucket load.”