The Munich Opera House has long rested much of its reputation on those two sturdy musical pillars, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss. Last week, as if to say that anything these two composed is worth audition, Munich opened its summer opera festival with two of the lamest and most persistently neglected of Mozart's and Strauss's works: Thames, King of Egypt, which Mozart composed at a precocious 17, and Der Friedenstag, written when Strauss was a world-weary 71.
Thames was not even Mozart's idea. Conceived by a wealthy dilettante named Tobias Philipp von Gebler...
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