If your email extension is att.net, snet.net, or sbcglobal.net, your server is AT&T. And you came to LitchfieldMonitor.com without having received the daily link. Thanks for coming here on your own. For the third time this year we’ve encountered what AT&T calls a network error. Other servers, like Microsoft, Hotmail, and Yahoo, also do the dirty, but not as often.

The bottom line is, if ever you don’t find a daily direct link to LitchfieldMonitor.com in your email, come here anyway. Unless I’m dead or otherwise unable to post a daily disquisition, you’ll find one . . .

—PMR

And I see this morning that Microsoft’s live.com is blocking again and hotmail.com has just joined the axis . . .

19 December—Maria Callas made her debut at the Palais Garnier—the Paris Opera—on 19 December 1958. The first half of the evening comprised Callas performing a few popular arias, backed by full chorus and orchestra, of course. The second half was the staged second act of Puccini’s “Tosca,” with Tito Gobbi and Albert Lance.

Here’s my favorite aria from that night, the beautiful “Casta Diva,” from Vincenzo Bellini’s “Norma,” bel-cantoed magnificently by La Divina, as Callas was known with some justification, standing still in front of the chorus.

(Vincenzo Bellini wrote lots of particularly beautiful music before dying young. Heinrich Heine had in fact told him that, like all the great geniuses, he’d die young, particularly citing Mozart, who didn’t get past 35, and Raphael, who made it to 37. Heine’s prediction didn’t make Bellini happy, of course, but he beat them both to the grave, by passing away at only 33. For the record, Franz Schubert had died at 31 and Juan Chrisóstomo Arriaga [“the Spanish Mozart”] at 19. Later on, Georges Bizet died at 36 and George Gershwin at 38.)

No, I wasn’t at La Divina’s Paris debut. Just listen and enjoy . . .