Posted on 03/10/2026 3:07:09 AM PDT by WhiteHatBobby0701
Timothée Chalamet is under fire this week and losing traction in the best actor Oscar race for saying just about the most obvious thing in the world: Nobody cares about ballet or opera in 2026.
Here is the exact quote from the "Dune" and "Marty Supreme" star during a recent CNN town hall: "I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore.' All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there."
The backlash was swift and severe. According to the BBC, Canadian mezzo-soprano Deepa Johnny described Chalamet's comments as a "disappointing take" while, American artist Franz Szony wrote, "Two classical art forms that have been around for hundreds of years, both of which take a massive amount of talent and discipline this man will never possess."
But to today’s pretty boy of Hollywood’s point, who the hell are these people?
When I was 10 years old, the greatest ballet dancer in the world was Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was as famous as Larry Bird or Doc Gooden, as was the greatest opera singer of the time, Luciano Pavarotti. That is gone today.
Today, almost no American has the slightest idea who the greatest ballet dancer or opera singer alive is, because it's not for them any more. The fine performing arts have become a bubble of progressive intolerance. They don’t even want us unwashed non-believers involved.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I was an adjunct professor at a technical college and one summer when they were short of faculty I volunteered to teach a class in art and music appreciation. I had my students watch the films “The Agony and the Ecstasy” and “Amadeus” and videos of Bizet’s opera “Carmen”. I even had them listening to some of the great jazz theme music from classic TV shows. I know for a few students it opened a whole new world of the arts. It is too bad that that our schools can’t provide at least a brief view of art and music for their students.
“Do you know how hard it is to get tickets at Covent Garden?”
Does anyone care how hard it is to get tickets at Covent Garden?
I would say live theater too - I’ve watched that die year over year for the past 20 years. We were members of two theater groups - one local, one for larger touring Broadway productions. All of the dinner theaters in our area have closed, the nearest one is in Phoenix, AZ, and that may have closed by now as well.
Saw audience numbers drop precipitously over the years, theaters 1/3 full on a Saturday night - with the theater groups begging for donations and new members.
Very sad.
If you enjoy opera, just get the oldest recordings you can. There are some exceptional ones out there.
Neil Stewart called it “Charismatic Worship” the first time we had a Q&A with our minister. It made me rethink everything and go back to college when Paul Crook called one CCM artist (Carman Liciardello, 1956-2021) a “Charismatic” — and I later understood it to mean personal experience and feelings triumph over the Word of God. It’s what led me out of a local Southern Baptist church that sang anything from Big Entertainment to a church an hour away that preaches the Word. I grew fed up with choirs that sang from Big Entertainment (and now Liberal Protestantism) choral karaoke. I knew something was wrong. The Fallen Angel (my Sunday School teacher, his name is similar to that of a fake wrestling with the gimmick) was right.
Sadly, the charismatic worship and big entertainment infiltrates kids who never grow up listening to hymns and only know charismatic influence. They grew up dancing to pop tunes in church. They grew up listening to Top 40 each Sunday. They are never prepared.
Stupid question.
How nice that you got to meet someone you clearly admire. I saw Renée Fleming a couple of decades ago at the Met in an excellent performance of La Traviata with Dmitri Hvorostovsky. In the final scene I could hear people weeping in the rows around me because of Fleming’s performance. The production was the elaborate and glamorous old one by Franco Zeffirelli. It was such a popular run of performances that people were standing outside the Met trying to get someone to sell their ticket to them.
I saw Traviata again at the Met a few years later with Diana Damrau and Plácido Domingo in his baritone phase. The singing was very good but the old production had been replaced with a modern, minimalist one. That just made it a lot harder to get into the performance emotionally. But at least there were still a few actual opera stars around then. Now no one seems to make the effort to cultivate the great talents or turn them into stars anymore.
At the turn of the millennium, Baryshnikov played in an event that was the symbol of culture — the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am) on the PGA Tour with the mid-teens handicap meaning his team would get one stroke benefits because the amateurs played with the ‘cap. With the current Signature Event rule cutting the field from 142 to 80, we’ve lost the signature of what was one of the best golf tournaments.
Baryshnikov’s partner was Tommy Tolles (2 Korn Ferry wins, 2 podiums in majors, podium in the PLAYERS). In that tournament, Jim McGovern played with the (current) President. Craig Stadler was paired with Glenn Frey (father of Eagles singer Deacon). Billy Andrade was paired with Roger Clemens. Phil Mickelson was paired with Kenny G. Rocco Mediate was paired with Vincent Furnier. Billy Ray Brown was paired with Clay Walker. David Toms was paired with Clint Eastwood. Mark O’Meara was paired with Ken Griffey, Jr.
The fact 10,000 show up for a girls’ dance concert from a major studio and less than 100 for a boys’ varsity baseball game shows how modern society is.
Big Media (”Big Entertainment” in my book) has even controlled churches today. At the church that I found myself on the wrong side of their progressive attitudes as a Southern Baptist church, they banned sound SBC doctrine in favour of their own created more Methodist doctrine where they’ve let a former member now UMC minister preach at Homecoming, and allianced themselves with an independent Methodist church 25 miles away. They use some SBC material for Sunday School but abandoned most of it after the 2018 Burleson takeover. I was the first target for voting against it. Their music began to use the fads from Big Entertainment, and boasted about using the CBF material.
I challenged the youth in 2008 after one service was kids dancing to pop tunes and puppets performing to them — in 2003, when I sang with their choir, we were often replaced by “interpretive dance” troupes or puppets. When we got to sing it was awful material from Warner Music most of the time that was karaoke and was the opposite of what I was being taught by Leah Hungerford (the masters vocal student who was teaching me), who said I had a Baroque quality voice. They wanted country music karaoke, I wanted sound doctrine from the organ. I was a sprint car running the cushion, not taking the low line.
The kids admitted to me in 2008 they didn’t trust the Bible when they had the all-dance service. They said the Bible was rewritten often and trusted pop culture more. Some of them denied the inerrancy of Scripture.
Fast Forward to now. Their primary source of church music was sold by Universal Music Group to the Mercer School of Music and Theology (a CBF institution). The CBF denies inerrancy of Scripture. And the Easter “cantata” the CBF pushes on churches includes material from artists who deny the Trinity. All because they relied on pop culture Top 40, refusing to see the denials of inerrancy they promote.
https://brentwoodbenson.com/choral.html?cat=222
That is a common misconception with people looking for an excuse, or who don't know the difference between rewriting of content or meaning, versus new translation that nevertheless derives from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
You appear to be a person who goes to original sources. No wonder the woke church is wary of you, and you of it! I recommend the LCMS.
“new translation that nevertheless derives from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.”
That implies that old translatios were in error.
These people had zero logic. Once I took classical voice, everything changed. Not just church music from what played to more serious, and it allowed me to appreciate classical music and opera.
That implies that old translatios were in error.
No, it recognizes the difference in language over the centuries. As you are aware, the King James Bible is written in Old English, with verb endings like "eth"—"doeth" and "goeth" instead of "does" and "goes." There are many other idiomatic expressions that deserve clarification as people have become less euphemistic in speaking about bodily functions, for one example.
Newer translations such as the NKJV (New King James Version) adjust for changes in language that are now universally accepted. Others attempt to bridge the differences in British usage and American usage, without changing the basic meaning of the passage. Still others attempt to move the language further towards how we speak in the 20th-21st centuries without sacrificing the spirit of the verses.
“attempt”
An attempt at God’s words ...
You can’t succeed without first attempting to. As you know, none of the speakers in the pages of the Bible spoke English. Translation had to start somewhere, but it should never be done from one translation to another, but always from the original Hebrew (Old Testament), the Greek and the Aramaic (New Testament) before setting the words in more contemporary language.
Don’t forget; the Great Commission of Jesus Christ is to spread the gospel throughout the world. That can’t be done without translation into many languages, even self-modernized languages like contemporary English. The key is that the starting point should always be the original languages: Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Reliable print translations of the Bible name the scholars who did the translation in the small print in the front or back of the volume.
As far as perfection goes, only God is perfect. But scholarly translators research even the history, dialects, idioms and customs that were in use when the originals were written, to stay as close to the spirit of the Word as possible when translating.
For the individual, prayer and listening for the promptings of the Holy Spirit should also accompany the seeker.
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