Are Gilbert and Sullivan bad in any dramatic way?
They have serious fandom.
How about Bach himself? The Grateful Dead?
I’m simply skeptical of the Shakespeare being seriously bad claim too. He had bad plays and no-one cares about them.
What about Chess? Poker? Why does D&D count but they don’t?
Anyway, I think that the largest effect at work here is that if anything attracts great enthusiasm it will attack aggressive attack. Everything has its flaws. So what? Tolkein’s fandom is MUCH greater than that of C.S. Lewis or countless other fantasy authors who has MUCH more awful about their work. Snobs and the asethetically competent criticize Crichton and Dan Brown plenty but they don’t have fandoms Wagner wasn’t special. All Opera is comically awful as well as great. That’s why we have terms like “soap opera” and “space opera”. Actually, maybe the Marriage of Figaro is just great, but it’s unique.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Lolita have the most passionate individual fans of any literature I know of, but they don’t congregate to express their admiration. The phenomenon of organized fandom needs large bodies of work to gather around, and the larger the body of work the greater the opportunities for awfulness.
My natural instinct is to ask why you singled out The Marriage of Figaro in particular (as opposed to, say, Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute)), but instead I’ll just interpret as a synecdoche for Mozart’s (later) operas in general—which are indeed regarded as unusual in their level of perfection.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say “Wagner wasn’t special”. In any case, he was (and to a large extent still is) a perfect example of someone with a fanatical fanbase, and equally fanatical critics. According to my reading of the expert consensus, it places him as one of the Titans of Opera, while acknowledging that his output is not uniform in its greatness. In other words: mostly great, with flaws, but not dramatically bad. (Similar to your description of Shakespeare, actually: people really only care about the best of Wagner.)
Are Gilbert and Sullivan bad in any dramatic way? They have serious fandom. How about Bach himself?
The Grateful Dead? I’m simply skeptical of the Shakespeare being seriously bad claim too. He had bad plays and no-one cares about them.
What about Chess? Poker? Why does D&D count but they don’t?
Anyway, I think that the largest effect at work here is that if anything attracts great enthusiasm it will attack aggressive attack. Everything has its flaws. So what?
Tolkein’s fandom is MUCH greater than that of C.S. Lewis or countless other fantasy authors who has MUCH more awful about their work. Snobs and the asethetically competent criticize Crichton and Dan Brown plenty but they don’t have fandoms Wagner wasn’t special. All Opera is comically awful as well as great. That’s why we have terms like “soap opera” and “space opera”. Actually, maybe the Marriage of Figaro is just great, but it’s unique.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Lolita have the most passionate individual fans of any literature I know of, but they don’t congregate to express their admiration. The phenomenon of organized fandom needs large bodies of work to gather around, and the larger the body of work the greater the opportunities for awfulness.
IAWYC, but I have a couple of musical issues:
My natural instinct is to ask why you singled out The Marriage of Figaro in particular (as opposed to, say, Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute)), but instead I’ll just interpret as a synecdoche for Mozart’s (later) operas in general—which are indeed regarded as unusual in their level of perfection.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say “Wagner wasn’t special”. In any case, he was (and to a large extent still is) a perfect example of someone with a fanatical fanbase, and equally fanatical critics. According to my reading of the expert consensus, it places him as one of the Titans of Opera, while acknowledging that his output is not uniform in its greatness. In other words: mostly great, with flaws, but not dramatically bad. (Similar to your description of Shakespeare, actually: people really only care about the best of Wagner.)