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NEW YORK (AP) -- The great recount isn't even over and it already has made it to an opera stage.
The election fight between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore was injected into Mozart's "The Magic Flute" on Monday night at the Metropolitan Opera.
Gerald Finley, singing the role of the bird catcher Papageno, is lost at the start of scene six of Act II, alone on the stage, trying to find the prince Tamino.
"Tamino! Tamino! Are you forsaking me?" Finley asked in German, following the lines by Mozart's librettist Emanuel Schikaneder.
Finley, still speaking in German, then inserted some new lines.
"Which way do I go?" the Canadian baritone said, turning to one side of the stage.
"Bush?" he asked slowly.
Then, turning to the other side: "Gore?"
The audience laughed loudly and Finley, who made his Met debut in the role two years ago, resumed the opera's usual text, proceeding into Papageno's aria "Ein Maedchen oder Weibchen" ("A Maiden or a Wife").
It was the Met's 338th performance of the opera, which had its premiere in Vienna, Austria, in 1791, when George Washington was president.
The opera, filled with Masonic symbols, is not particularly political, dealing with the struggles of Tamino and Papageno to find brides as they are caught in the fight between the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, the High Priest of the Temple of Isis and Osiris.
