Operas

Jose Carreras, who gained international fame as one of the Three Tenors with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo, told the Times of London that his opera career may be over. In an interview published Friday, the 62-year-old Spanish singer said he could no longer withstand the rigors of performing principal opera roles, unamplified. "If I can do concert recitals, adapting the repertoire to my needs, then no problem, that's good enough," he said. "But with operas, unless the right circumstances come up, my career is done."

The 234th season of Russia's world-famous Bolshoi Theater opened in Moscow on Tuesday with chaos, tragedy, betrayal and strife. Offstage, the plot was scarcely less dramatic. Hours before the curtain went up on the opening night's production of Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov," the Bolshoi's newly appointed musical director was presented to the press. Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov freely admitted in an interview that he was in the role temporarily after the abrupt departure of his predecessor, Alexander Vedernikov.

Mark Morris wants to be interviewed in an uptown tavern. It looks like a dive from the outside, but it's not. The nachos are just as Morris describes them--fabulous. Morris is known here, so the bartender is already pouring a pint of Anchor Steam from the tap as the choreographer walks in the door. "Glug, glug, glug," Morris greets him.

In Lillian Hellman's play "The Little Foxes," heroine Regina Giddens and her brothers hatch a money-grabbing scheme that lends new meaning to the word "greed." With thievery, backstabbing and Southern bile to beat the band, she storms her way to a famously blackhearted ending.

Swadesh Jain used to travel New Delhi's streets perched on the back of a rickshaw, visiting relatives, perusing shops and taking in the latest Bollywood movies. When her only son and his family moved to Naperville, Jain came too, trading her balmy homeland for the snowy suburbs and a life where everyone's schedule is jampacked -- except hers. Jain's son, Himanshu, a technology consultant, shuttles to San Francisco for work several days a week. Her daughter-in-law, Payal, juggles a job and her two kids' after-school dance, swim and math lessons.

Alun Hoddinott, 78, a composer who wrote music for the British royal family and was an influential promoter of modern music in his native Wales, died Wednesday at a hospital in Swansea, Wales, his family said. They did not release the cause of death. Hoddinott composed more than 300 operas, symphonies and songs, including music for Prince Charles' 16th birthday and a fanfare for the prince's marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. Born in the Welsh mining town of Bargoed in 1929, Hoddinott took violin lessons at age 4 and won a university scholarship at 16. He studied with Australian composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin and wrote his first major concerto in 1949 while he was still a student.

Soap operas: An article in Thursday's Calendar section about the declining fortunes of daytime dramas referred to CBS' "The Bold and the Beautiful" as the most-watched network soap opera. In fact, it is CBS' "The Young and the Restless"; "The Bold and the Beautiful" is second.

OF course, we've all had favorite shows that, when canceled, filled us with outrage ["Loyal Propositions," by Robert Lloyd, May 20]. I remember when CBS canceled "Beauty and the Beast" -- I didn't watch anything on CBS until "CSI" started! "B&B" ended in 1990 and "CSI" started in 2000, so we're talking about a 10-year boycott. And believe me, I didn't miss a thing. What intrigues, and could start quite a debate, is: Why is it that soap operas stay on the air for 20 or 30 years and, like the Energizer bunny, just keep going -- and going and going -- but other genres on TV can't even last a season without getting canceled?

David SHAW'S article suggesting that PBS be discontinued was a total waste of time. It would have been better for him to discuss the mentality required to view commercial television shows -- including laugh-track specials, soap operas and sponsors that control content. Advertising is always finding the path of least resistance, and since our country rates about 49th internationally in literacy, is it any wonder? At least with PBS you hear both sides, and the rest is up to the viewer to interpret.