Your doyenne asks that if you have chitchat; announcements of birthdays, deaths or anniversaries; or any other sort of comment that doesn’t seem to fit into an active topic, you keep it in this thread. Going forward, La Cieca will post a new “Intermission Feature” OT conversation anchor each Sunday night for the following week’s chitchat.

“I have about 40 years’ worth of the British magazine Opera, most of them bound, which I would love to get rid of (no charge.) No library here is interested, but I thought some opera fanatic might want them. He or she would have to pick them up from my building [on the Upper West Side].”

If you are the fanatic in question, you may contact the declutterer at hooziedujour@gmail.com.

If you do have some important information to impart over the weekend (especially if it’s a long block of text) La Cieca suggests you keep a copy of the comment as a text file locally, on your hard drive, on the chance that it fails to archive. By Monday, the “propagation” process (making sure everyone’s computer is accessing the version of parterre.com on the new server) should be complete, and it will be business as usual, not unlike our own dear federal government.

In the meantime, La Casa della Cieca should not be affected at all, so your doyenne looks forward to seeing you there this afternoon at 1:00 pm during Le Comte Ory.

Note below this (and all other posts) there are a couple of buttons for sharing the posting via social media. The thumbs-up “Like” button to the left will alert those in your Facebook news feed of your interest, and the little birdie “Tweet” button sends a link to the parterre posting to your Twitter timeline.

La Cieca’s not asking you just to click on the buttons willy-nilly, you understand, but when you do see a posting that particularly interests you, and you think would interest your Facebookies or Twitterbugs or whatever they’re called, she does urge you to take advantage of these social media tools. It is, after all, you, the cher public, who are La Cieca’s very best advocates!

To reply directly to any comment, just click on the “reply” link at the lower right of any comment.

Those of you who just want to check quickly on the most recent comments can continue to do so by clicking on the Comments Feed button in the left nav bar.

To read what La Cieca should have posted for this milestone, you might want to take a look at this comment (you can skip over the scolding first paragraph).

Among other milestones: we’re currently at 116,478 comments (an average of about 40 comments per post) and, though it may be premature to boast, all indications are that April 2010 will the highest number of monthly pageviews on parterre.com ever, a cool half million.

And so, my appreciation goes to all of you little pubes, who indeed deserve the credit for parterre.com’s latest milestone: our highest number of monthly pageviews ever.

And how many times did you (and the rest) look at parterre.com during the month of March 2010? That would be 425,327 times, to be exact.

As for me, I can only say that I am proud and happy and that I regard this great honor not so much as an award for what I have achieved, but as a standard to hold against what I have yet to accomplish.

UPDATE: Opera-L is now operational again.

Second, and in the broad view surely far more important, there is now a term to refer to a single member of the cher public, other than “member of the cher public.”  A hint:

A “subscribe to comments” option for each posting. That way each time a new comment was entered for a given posting, you’d receive an email alerting you. Note that in busy conversations like the recent “Abreast of the season,” that would mean you might receive a hundred or more emails in a day if you subscribed to that thread.

… or,

A “notify of reply” option for each comment. The way this works is, you enter a comment, and you are given the choice whether you want to be informed when there is a direct reply.  Note that, if people reply to other comments on the thread, you would not be informed.

Both of these would be “opt-in,” so if you are happy or at least indifferent to the way the comments are displaying currently, you wouldn’t have to do anything. If you do want to be notified, you would need to be sure that the email address given in on your profile page is correct and up to date.

“As heard on the web yesterday, the singing was mediocre at best. But does that matter anymore?”

Why not?
Here’s why. Because that kind of comment is boring, predictable, useless. There are a lot of you who have very interesting things to say, from 3,000 word analyses to two-word one-liners. All those comments are more than welcome. What La Cieca doesn’t want to read is yet another expression of just how dreadfully bored and listless you are. Because talking about being bored, meanwhile expressing yourself in a boring way, is, frankly, boring.

So if what you’re about to post really sounds boring to you, please think twice, and at the very least try to sound entertaining, even if you can’t quite bring yourself to sound entertained.

Carry on.

La Cieca welcomes to the editorial desk of parterre.com new correspondents squirrel and Ercole Farnese, who have already begun their blanket coverage of the New York City opera scene. 

Congratulations as well to CruzSF! For his astute commentary in the Future Shock thread, he will receive the coveted autographed copy of Sacrificium. La Cieca is sure you will all join her in raising a celebratory Castratini to his victory.

As for further additions to the parterre staff, La Cieca is still poring through the vast and dauntingly superb reviews that have gushed into our Sunnyside offices, which is mostly her own fault for locating in a basement apartment. She will send out invitations to further assignments to those best of the best in the next week or so.

In the meantime (and even afterward), please remember, cher public, that La Cieca is very interested in what you have to say. If there’s something you want to write (rant, review, think piece, whatever), please send La Cieca an email pitching your idea.

Cher public, La Cieca would like to call your attention to the latest innovation by our webmeister Nick Scholl: threaded comments. You can now reply to a specific comment (instead of the entire thread) and thus we can avoid having to start every reply with, “squirrel, you have got to be kidding me!” (Though doubtless some of you will still feel the emotional need to continue to do so.) 

Just look for the red “Reply” link at the lower right corner of the comment to which you want to make a reply.

La Cieca is happy to announce that parterre.com is now accepting advertising via blogads.

La Cieca is holding auditions this week, looking for a few good reviewers of opera CDs and DVDs.  If you think are the next Irene Cara or Gene Anthony Ray of the opera critics, email lacieca@parterre.com with the following details:

• A mailing address where you can receive packages
• Your general area of interest or expertise in opera
• Your preferred format (CD or DVD)

La Cieca will then ship you couple of things to review, and she’ll expect a piece back from you within a week after your receipt of the package.

After the piece is published on parterre.com, we’ll see how La Cieca and the cher public like it.  The goal here is to find a couple of reviewers who will get the bulk of the new releases and will become regular contributors here for some compensation.

Questions you can ask in the comments section, or email La Cieca personally.

Your doyenne modestly would like to introduce the lastest of her far-flung business empire, a mini-store at amazon.com called La Cieca’s Little Shop of Arias. She suggests you bookmark this site as a convenient one-stop location for all the latest opera CDs, DVDs and other regalia. As with the various other amazon advertising here on the site, La Cieca will receive a commission on each and every purchase you make at her Little Shop.

The controversy over the new Met Tosca has driven parterre box’s weekly page views to an all-time high, for the first time ever topping the 100,000 mark. For the week of September 20-26, 2009, a total of 110,413 pageviews were logged by Google Analytics, far surpassing the previous record of 90,505 achieved in the third week of March, 2009.

The opening night chat alone garnered over 15,000 views.

La Cieca is delighted to announce the addition of a new feature to our little site by the utterly estimable Nick Scholl. From this point onward, cher public, you will be empowered to embed YouTube videos in the comments section. (Up until now, you could insert a link, but now, the actual video will appear in your comment.) Instructions on how to accomplish this feat follow the jump.

First, you find a video on YouTube that is in some way relevant to the discussion at hand. Now, on that YouTube, page, find the URL (it’s in a box off to the right.)

Copy the URL, then return to your parterre.com comment box, and paste it there. DO NOT HIT “SUBMIT” YET!

What you see in the comment box should look like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgrFFtjLJUs

Now insert a lower-case letter “v” just before the colon, like so –

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgrFFtjLJUs

You can also include the usual text discussion either above or below the video if you like.

Then just hit “submit.” The YouTube video will magickally appear on the comments page.

La Cieca invites you to give this new feature a try in the comments section of this post.

La Cieca is proud to relaunch a completely overhauled parterre.com, previously seen in fragments, dribs and drabs, but now here to stay. The new look features a return to the (now) retro punky aesthetic of the early ’90s zine, updated fonts and all sorts of other improvements intended to enhance your reading and commenting pleasure.

Designer of the new parterre look is that Cardin of the CSS Nicholas Scholl, formerly of Trrill and currently busily tweeting from (at?) twitter.com/trrill. He is also a member of the team at Patent Leather Daddy.

Your doyenne welcomes your reactions to the new look.

La Cieca’s band of elfin techies are moving parterre.com to a new hosting server. What that means to you, cher public, is that you may experience outages of posts, images or media content on this site for a few days. You’ve all been so swell for the last couple of weeks while we worked this out, and so La Cieca knows you will be patient with her for just a little while longer.

Meanwhile, if you’re reading this, that means you’re probably past all the difficult stuff and you can just sit back and enjoy. Oh, and comment of course. Please comment!

Meanwhile, JJ is off to hear Madame Vera.

Thanks, folks.

La Cieca’s trying a new look for parterre.com, since she must confess that the light-on-dark format was beginning to get a little wearing on her aging eyes. Comments? Suggestions?

A little housekeeping on this lovely spring morning, cher public. Starting today, commenters will be required to log in to the site. Most of you are already signed up and logged in as it is, so this new condition will mostly apply to new visitors to parterre.com. The login will be helpful to La Cieca in keeping spam out of the comments and in filtering out the rare hit-and-run insult that shows up from time to time here.

La Cieca thanks you for your patience and your understanding, and asks you to remember that she doesn’t hate you, she hates the dirt.