Are there actually any operas with a fat lady singing at the end, or a fat lady in a Viking helmet with horns and holding a spear?
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Amorphous Blob is thrilled to have hair
ANSWERS: 4
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Isn't that the only kind there is?
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Well,she doesn't have a helmet with horns, nor a spear, and she doesn't need to be fat, but at the end of Richard Strauss' " Salome," Salome sings a love song to the decapitated, bloody, dripping head of John the Baptist, as she wields it around the stage.
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The saying "It ain't over until the fat lady sings" comes from music hall, when there was often a singing number, usually sentimental or patriotic, at the end, and as they got on a bit the singers tended towards overweight. This saying has then been mixed up by cartoonists with the Valkyries in Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas, warrior maidens who pick up fallen warriors from the field of battle and carry them to heaven. The are not particularly at the end of the opera, but they have also been know to be somewhat overweight. You cannot fill an opera house with sound, especially before electronic amplification, on a supermodel diet. Singing over Wagner's horns took some doing. So it is a cartoonist's conflation of two separate cultural cliches.
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Yes ALL of them end that way.
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