The battle between Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and the dedicated opera fans who want him to stop sticking his nose into the search for the next director of the Vienna State Opera is getting awfully operatic itself. “The leftist Green Party labeled him ‘an operetta chancellor who considers art important only if he can put himself on center stage.’ Thomas Trenkler, an editor of the Vienna newspaper Der Standard, wrote that Mr. Gusenbauer was misusing ‘art as a political stage.'”