We are a group of music lovers trained in the sciences whose lives have been greatly enriched by classical music and FanFaire is our way of sharing with the world the many joys it has given us through the years.

FanFaire is everything that the words FAN, FAIR(E), and FANFARE connote. FanFaire is a creation of fans of opera and classical music, thus it is a "fan-zine", but one devoted to singing the praises not of one artist alone but of many. FanFaire is about a "fair" that never ends - it is about the concerts and the operas and the music festivals we have attended in the past and will continue to attend in the future, and it is about the music we listen to at home - our way of having a truly good time, rather like going to the fair! FanFaire is also about being fair - being only self-taught in music appreciation we will share with you as best we can the music and the performances we've most enjoyed; being trained in neither musicology nor music criticism we will pretend to be neither theorists nor critics and thus will make no attempt at demolishing artistic reputations. FanFaire is likewise a play on the the Middle English "faire", an allusion to things old or classic or timeless, a device to remind us that music created hundreds of years ago is as beautiful and satisfying now as it was in its day. (Not that classical music is what some people call "grandparents' music" - indeed in future issues, we shall feature classical music artists modern in outlook and very much in the prime of their youth.) And finally, FanFaire is about fanfare, as in "a flourish of trumpets," - music, which for us is the most enjoyable if not the loftiest art, is always a form of celebration.

In our premiere issue, we celebrated the music of Richard Wagner, specifically the "Ring Cycle", the artistry of one of its foremost interpreters - the German soprano Hildegard Behrens, and the Metropolitan Opera's acclaimed production staged in the spring of 1997. Each subsequent contains as much textual information as we feel the "cyber-reader" can take (technological advances notwithstanding, the monitor screen, being more a medium for casual rather than serious reading, remains a poor substitute for curling up in bed with a good book); for the more deeply interested, "Suggested Reading" lists are occasionally offered. Whenever the requisite permission is granted, brief sound clips of the music (written or performed by our featured artists) are included and at times downloadable in the hope that doing so would entice the reader to buy the CD or attend a performance and/or listen to the whole work and thereby deepen his/her interest in classical music - which after all is best appreciated by listening to than by reading about it.

Over the past years, critics and enthusiasts alike have decried what they perceive to be the "graying" of classical music, if not its sad decline. Classical music in all its forms is a universal treasure and those of us whose lives have been enriched by it must do all we can to keep it alive. By launching FanFaire in cyberspace, we hope to do our bit to ensure that it endures well into the millennium.

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