OPERA AS HISTORY.(Opera Review)

Opera houses are supposed to be fantasy places, where outlandish lovers meet and villains spiral to their inevitable fates. To present an opera about the Holocaust--as the composer Nicholas Maw has done, with "Sophie's Choice," which recently had its premiere in London--shuts down the usual rituals of escape. I was surely not the only one at the Royal Opera House who felt a kind of aesthetic panic when, toward the end of the evening, the tenor Jorma Silvasti came onstage as Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, singing about crematorium construction. Are there limits to what music can express? Should such evilness be sung, made to sound half beautiful? At the edge of ...