October 28.

Michael Tumelty's article about Scottish Opera's production of Julius

Caesar serves to highlight the considerable gap between the perceptions

of the professional musicologist and those of the non-professional music

lover (October 28).

The professional seems to regard an opera as a technical problem best

solved by some avant-garde producer with outrageous ideas. The music

lover hopes to find his enjoyable entertainment by great music will be

enlarged and enhanced by the stage presentation.

At the performance of Julius Caesar I quickly concluded that the

on-stage cavorting of some hairless clowns of indeterminate gender (by

sight or sound) was unlikely to produce such enhancement of Handel's

great music, and the competing attraction on BBC2 of Verdi's Otello

performed by an apparently normal, healthy, and attractive cast

(wickedness and all) in beautiful surroundings proved irresistible.

I made for the theatre exit at the point when King Ptolemy was kissing

his army general, and it may therefore be contended that half an hour is

scarcely enough time to assess a three-hour production.

Scottish Opera, however, might do well to take into account the

possibility that present subscribers may in future prefer to spend no

time at all in assessing their productions and an audience restricted to

musicologists will not do much to solve their financial problems.

Robert E. Macdonald,

Southdown,

Dunvegan Drive,

Newton Mearns.