Manuela Hoelterhoff

If you don’t have tickets to the last performance of Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” (Twilight of the Gods) at the Metropolitan Opera on May 11, why not stay home and sing along with Deborah Voigt, the Brunnhilde, while crisping your fingers on an oven burner?

Glyndebourne’s hit 2005 production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” sailed into the Metropolitan Opera last Thursday, dropping the original Cleopatra and Julius Caesar along the way.

I want 10 weeks of vacation and if I don’t get what I want, I’m going on strike.

Summer in East Hampton, autumn in Rome, trysts in Manhattan and Paris: Charles Dubow’s first novel, “Indiscretion,” hits all the sweet spots.

The other week, water rose over the cafe chairs in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. Even doughty German tourists had to flee.

In performances of Wagner’s 5-hours- plus “Parsifal,” the suffering on stage is so often shared by the audience.

Herodotus couldn’t help noticing the capes made of flayed skin or the skulls fashioned into cups. The Scythians liked to recycle and travel light as they tormented the Persian army with hit-and-run attacks.

Rigoletto sings his last duet sitting on the bumper of a finned Cadillac. His dying daughter Gilda is in the boot, one arm dangling near the parking lights.

Nicolas Berggruen, 51, is polite, thoughtful, cultivated and fashionable -- from his un-linked French cuffs and slightly messy collar to his quiet loafers.

This is the second Christmas that Ludivine Barbier will endure without her husband, the conductor Rodolfo Cazares, who was kidnapped in Mexico in July 2011.

The demise of Hostess affected me deeply. I am glad my mutti wasn’t around for this disaster.

Living in the world of Beyonce and Rihanna makes it hard to conjure up an era when the word “diva” was reserved for people of such altitudinous vocal talent and bad manners that only evocations of divinity could do them justice.