Our top story of 2021 is a morality tale of operatic ingratitude
NewsJust under 21 million people have visited slippedisc.com so far in 2021 and we’re very glad to have served them our 24/365 diet of exclusive news, features, musical rarities and special gifts for subscribers.
Our biggest story of the year in terms of readership was the death of Alberto Vilar, opera’s biggest ever benefactor who was shunned and cancelled by industry bosses after he went to jail for a fraud he denied. We owe him, among other gifts, the seatback surtitles at the Met, Vienna Opera and elsewhere. His name has been removed from all these institutions.
Here are the top 10 slippedisc stories of 2012 (source: Google Analytics):
1 Alberto Vilar dies, 67,000 readers
2 Conservatives are crap at singing, 65,000
3 The Met’s Requiem is cut short, 45,000
4 United Airlines is still the worst, 40,000
5 Andre Rieu loses it, 39,000
6 Gruberova dies, 38,000
7 I hate West Side Story, 28,000
8 Top soprano dies of Covid, 28,000
9 Nelson Freire dies, 28,000
10 James Levine got married, 27,000
Mr Vilar was tried and convicted under due process. Unless you have compelling new evidence demonstrating his innocence, the fact that he denied the crime of which he was convicted is neither here nor there. James Levine denied everything too and he didn’t get cut the same slack on this site.
==Just under 21 million people have visited slippedisc.com
Bravo, but is it not a case of 21m *visits* ? Not people.
Think of it in terms of regulars. If say a third of your readers go to SD twice every week and the other two thirds just once every week – that’s a userbase of approx 100,000 people
Still pretty good though.
well I come to SD every day of the week. Really
So DO I but it is a pity the posts are quickly put aside,making retrieving almost impossible .I guess no one goes back to previous posts.
So do I, and I tend to skim through the articles up to abut page 4, re-opening ones I was especially interested in to see if there are more comments.
I find it a pity that posts by readers are uploaded so rarely, as it restricts discussion. I wonder how many of these “monitors” we are always hearing about that there really are…
Might be worth allowing unmonitored discussion for a while to see how it goes.
The list of most-read really surprises me.
Plenty of the unmonitored and the abusive to read on social media without it coming here. Some on here have verged on that already, plus it is Norman Lebrecht’s lwn site not ours to run wild!
Agree that unmonitored would lead to much more discussion — a win-win.
Yes, so do I as I get two emails a day and also on facebook.
Here I thought it was just me and 20 other people who have clicked on a million times.
Hope the 21 million have all signed up and subscribed for three years as I have to say thanks for this site!
Once i saw that PBS was using a Rieu show to hustle donations, i realized that we were all f-k’d. The beginning of the end was when this clown showed up. Judging by how many folks here jump on his bandwagon, clearly demonstrates that this sight is not for professional musicians. Still, worth a weekly giggle. Carry on. Also, a good place for occasional schadenfreude.
Nor for professional spellers, it seems. But this SITE is surely not meant to be only for professional musicians? And, BTW, like him or not, Andre Rieu is a professional musician, so your point would be?
I wouldn’t go to one of his concerts, either, as it happens, but I do not operate from prejudice but from preference.
The way to save classical music is not to demean those of whom we do not approve. Some of them, like Lang Lang, are doing more to get people into concert halls than much superior musicians can these days.
And it would be nice to see a lessening of snobbery, hostility, exclusivism and downright nastiness. When there is discussion from various points of view, it is sometimes possible to learn something. Or at least to be tempted to think through a position.
You’ll be happy to know that Mr Vilar’s name is proudly displayed on the donor’s wall of the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden.