Incoming email from Alan Little:

You might find this interesting, from Tyler Cowen et al's excellent libertarian economics blog Marginal Revolution: The DVD format is taking over the classical music world, especially opera.

I don't think music DVDs will be all that relevant for me. Even if they're as cheap as CDs and have at-least-as-good sound quality (I know audio-only DVD is supposed to be great, albeit a stillborn format; I haven't really seriously listened to how good movie DVD soundtracks are), they're still not relevant to my music-listening life. I mostly listen to music while doing other things, whereas a DVD expects you to sit down and give it your undivided attention. With a toddler in the house my attention is almost never undivided. I would consider buying DVDs if they were cheap and there was an easy way to get the audio off of them into a usable format (CD or mp3) – I do know how to do this but it's laborious and I really don't think I could be bothered on a regular basis.

The point passed on (from Klaus Heyman of Naxos) by the Marginal Revolutionary Tyler Cowen about DVDs of opera is that opera on DVD is now starting to sell massively better than opera on CD, i.e. opera with only the sound. Thus, although DVD-ing an opera is presumably at least as bothersome as merely recording it, and copying the DVD is no easier, DVDs of opera, because many more are willing to buy them if the price is right, are now roaring down the supply/demand curve, and are thus finding their profitable price to be way below that of opera on CD.

Which is obvious, because opera is a dramatic thing as well as an audio thing. I am so obsessed with classical music that I have lots of CDs of operas, because I love the sound they make. But trawling through the libretto to find out what the hell they are singing about (seldom in English of course) is very irksome, and you miss lots of excitement by not being able to see, e.g. Wagner giants or Queens of the Night or Czars of Russia or Kings of Egypt, plus all their assembled minions. Obviously. So, although I can just about be doing with opera on CD (I bought the new René Jacobs Marriage of Figaro only yesterday), opera on DVD has already been a godsend to me.

I also have a few operas on VHS, but they are terrible. They look terrible, and above all, NO SUBTITLES. DVDs, in addition to be far nicer to look at, DO HAVE SUBTITLES. This is crucial for me.

I like DVD operas even when the production is weird, as they tend to be for Ring Cycle operas, for example, with dams and goldfish bowls instead of the Rhine, 1920s society hostesses instead of Norse Goddesses, and (my favourite Wagnabsurdity so far) scruffy librarians waving enormously long spears in the Boulez/Bayreuth Gotterdammerung. (Is the idea is that they are losing their grip, having inherited power that they no longer know how to use? Maybe that's it.)

(Wagnabsurdity. Did I just think of that word? I mean, I did, but who else has?)

However, what Alan Little says about undivided attention is also very, very true. When I sit down to watch a DVD, any DVD, I have to look at it and listen to it, and I have to look and listen continuously or I lose the plot, literally. This also is very irksome, and DVDs don't answer this problem. They are this problem, as Alan says.

Now I agree that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony packs a hell of a lot more punch if you concentrate on that all the way though also, but the fact is that if you do a blog posting or some work-work or something during the second movement and completely ignore it banging away in the background, but then tune in again to the last movement, you can still get a lot out of that experience. Music, to refer back to this quote (which I notice Alan also liked and quoted) music happens now, and if all you do is tune into it now, having ignored all that went before, you get a great deal of what it is saying. Tuning into an opera now, in the middle of an act, means you miss the point.

To put it another way, DVDs of opera have the potential to break out of the ghetto of being listened to only by people who already love this music, like me. Opera can be, as it used to be before the gramophone was invented, in the vanguard of classical musical publicity, instead of staggering along at the rear the way it has for the last fifty years or so. (Opera arias are a complete other matter!)

I need two things before I go mad with operatic DVDs.

First (originally I put this second – but actually it is first), I need for the DVD opera sellers to stop trying to gouge twenty five quid per opera out of me, and to settle for a tenner. After all, that's all that they now charge me for Lawrence of Arabia, which was a hell of a lot more of a bother to make even than an opera DVD. It may not seem fair to them but sorry, twenty five quid is more than I can get into the habit of spending. (Economics – I am becoming more and more convinced – is all about the cost of habits rather than just of individual items.)

And second, when that negotiation between supply and demand has finally been settled in my favour, for lots of DVD operas if not all of them, I will then be wanting a good fat book called Opera on DVD, which surely must exist, but which I never seem to come across in bookshops, even in the shelves groaning with guides to classical CDs. The Internet is great at giving me the best price on an opera DVD that I have already decided I want, but I need to decide what I want in the first place. Anyone know of a book like that? Or a website? The point is not prices, in the sense of £11.99 instead of £14.99. Once I know what I want, I can keep an eye open for it, and buy it when I see it cheap enough. Or, I can finally get into the buying-stuff-from-the-Internet habit, which so far I have not done because I like to combine shopping with taking some exercise. What I want is comparative reviews, of things like, say, all the four regularly available DVDs out there of Turandot (plus of the new DVD of Turandot which has just come out), which are descriptively helpful as well as (which is fair enough) opinionated, so that even if he hates it I will be able to tell that I might like it, or vice versa, so that I know what I am looking for.

I'd even consider regularly buying a monthly magazine entirely devoted to opera on DVD, with opera on CD only mentioned in a sneering little page near the end laced with yet more DVD propaganda.

Caution one. Forget about video. It has to be DVDs. (See above.)

Caution two. I don't want an "Internet Site" where I can spend thousands of happy hours chatting about why the Levine New York Met Ring is better/worse than the Boulez Bayreuth Ring, and why the latest one from Germany is barking bonkers etc. etc.. I do not have these hours. More fundamentally, such hours would not be happy. I am not that fond of my fellow classical music enthusiasts. Mad, sad bastards the lot of them, as good as, as far as I'm concerned, and I bet that's just how most of them feel about me. If all that Alan Little and I had in common was a liking for classical music then – no offence (as people say when they are about to be offensive) – I wouldn't be interested. Happily he is also a blogger, and a general discusser of all manner of other things that also interest me. An entirely different proposition.

Even if both of those conditions are fulfilled I probably won't go mad. I like opera, every now and again. Real opera lovers love it. Obviously. (As this person would say. Good that she's found her blog voice again.)