EV 1694 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1694 (Hints)

Final Scene by Kcit

Hints and tips by Phibs

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I thought I’d give ChatGPT a chance to impress, asking “A themed crossword tells us that the grid will represent the situation approaching halfway through the final scene of an opera. Can you suggest some operas where this point might be significant?”

ChatGPT was quick to demonstrate a knowledge of opera which far outstripped my own (not a difficult task, admittedly), coming up with no less than eight possibilities ranging from Mozart to Britten, each set out along the following lines:

Puccini – Tosca
Final scene: Execution of Cavaradossi on the rooftop.
Midpoint significance: Tosca believes she has saved Mario, only to realize the execution is real. A tragic revelation that might suit a deceptive grid theme.

Wagner – Götterdämmerung
Final scene: Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene.
Midpoint significance: The moment she understands Siegfried’s betrayal and resolves to bring about the end of the gods. Perfect for a fiery, apocalyptic grid.

A ‘fiery, apocalyptic grid’? Lordy. Having checked the Royal Mail’s list of prohibited items, I would strongly advise against the submission of such a thing.

Preamble: The grid represents the situation approaching halfway through the FINAL SCENE of an opera. Six entries (none of them words) are formed from clue answers by a representation of the events of the scene. The wordplay in eleven clues refers to an extra letter not entered in the grid: these letters spell out what is being sung. Seven other clues each contain a single misprint in the definition – the correct letters spell the name of the composer. Solvers must highlight the two key words (19 cells in two straight lines) in the opera’s title. Numbers in parentheses are the number of spaces for the entry.

18 clues feature a gimmick. In seven instances, a misprint in the definition will need to be corrected before the clue can be solved, with the replacement letters spelling out a 7-letter name. In a further 11 clues, the wordplay delivers an extra letter – so if a clue were “King to summon setter (4)”, the wordplay would give K + CITE, the answer would be KCIT, and the bonus letter E. We need to make sure that we keep track of the two groups of message letters separately.

Six answers need to be modified in some way before entry into the grid, producing non-words, and it sounds as though their lengths will be changed. We aren’t told which these are, so I would suggest entering every answer which is the ‘correct’ length (in pencil, of course) and holding back only those whose length doesn’t match the enumeration in brackets.

Across

1a  Old farmer fencing acreage around wildcat (7)
Quite a tricky (but ungimmicked) clue to start with, involving an obsolete 4-letter word for a husbandman along with two abbreviations, the first of one letter and the other of two letters.

7a  Crack military team limiting our group’s impact (5)
When a setter indicates an abbreviation for something that no longer exists using anything other than the words which are abbreviated, it’s generally accepted that they must add an ‘old hat’ qualifier (eg ‘once’, ‘in the past’ etc). So TA can be indicated by ‘Territorial Army’, but not by ‘volunteers’ alone, since the British Territorial Army became the Army Reserve in 2012; something like ‘volunteers formerly’ is required. However, the unqualified 3-letter abbreviation here refers to a wartime military intelligence unit which was dissolved before even I was born (no, really). The answer may make you think less of impact and more of herring preservation.

11a  Shone? With help, returned luminance (4)
A common 3-letter word (verb or noun) answering to ‘help’ is ‘returned’ ahead of a rather less frequently encountered abbreviation. This is one of those clues where you’ll probably get the answer before experimenting with changes to single letters in the definition.

15a  Item in newspaper failed to appear before the day (6, two words)
The first element of the wordplay, which is five letters long and contributes four letters to the answer, would be interchangeable with ‘failed to appear’ in a sentence such as ‘He failed to appear at school yesterday”. The second word of the answer is contributed in its entirety by an abbreviation.

19a  Antique cheval mirror broke finally after show of disgust (5)
There is, in fact, only one possible misprint in the definition here, but if you worked it out without knowing that this was a misprint clue, you are one smart cookie! Two letters individually selected from words in the clue follow something that would more usually be described as an expression of disgust, shown by Chambers as ‘old or facetious’ (I have been called both).

21a  Lower-class refusal in Paris to accept one from outside trade agreement (7)
The ‘lower-class’ provides exactly half of the letters in the answer (wherein its hyphen is retained), though ‘not upper-class’ or ‘not comme il faut‘ would probably be more accurate.

23a  Head for Australia, returning in pursuit of male Nobel prize-winner (4)
This is quite a tricky one (particularly for those of us who, unlike our setter, are non-antipodean), the key element of the wordplay being an Australian slang term for the head (as well as the name of the Newfoundland who looked after the Darling children in Peter Pan). There had, as of 2024, been 976 individual Nobel laureates – this one was awarded the Literature prize in 1929.

32a  Improve on previous skit? Director about to continue without change after reflection (5)
The ‘Director’ here leads not to a single-letter abbreviation but to a 3-letter one, which is put ‘about’ something else prior to ‘reflection’. It’s clear which word of the definition is misprinted, but even when you know the answer the correct definition might seem a bridge too far.

33a  Theatrical villain’s wife mostly intended to suppress evil, being repulsed (6)
A 5-letter word meaning ‘intended’ takes part in three cryptic manoeuvres (‘to suppress’ here indicating containment), but it is the word for ‘evil’ which gives up the bonus letter. The Shakespearean villain in question was unhappy about being passed over in favour of the ‘great arithmetician’ Cassio (inventor of the electronic calculator).

38a  Man or woman? Seems evident when twirling after clothing removed (4)
Before the twirling takes place, the ‘clothing’ must be removed from a pair of consecutive words in the clue, treated as a single unit. I had always believed that the name here was exclusively feminine until I read a short story by Saki in which it is given to a hyena of uncertain gender; this unisex usage is confirmed by the ‘Some first names’ appendix of Chambers.

Down

3d  Flowering plants showed hooked forms around middle of July (8)
The required sense of ‘show’ in the wordplay relates to films, while the ‘hooked forms’ are the 4-letter plural of a 5-letter word.

10d  Tidy amounts of water getting drunk (6)
In this 4+2 charade, the amounts of water are seriously large; ‘getting drunk’ leads to a short word of many meanings, one of which is ‘on the way to being drunk’.

26d  Excessive talk at table raised orange dye (6)
The two wordplay elements which combine here are both three letters long; the first is an abbreviation invariably spelt using only capitals, and the second is often seen as a suffix in words describing a collection of things relating to a particular person, place or activity, but is also itself a term for any collection of table talk or anecdotes.

29d  Japanese food that’s eaten day six (5)
A Japanese culinary paste accounts for most of the answer in another clue where the tough part is correcting the definition…

33d  Big move no longer occupying some of the tenants (4)
…and while the wordplay here is straightforward, the definition is probably even harder to reverse engineer.

36d  Northern meadow very cold with grain failing (3)
A 6-letter word meaning ‘very cold’, often used in relation to a wind, loses a 3-letter word for a ‘grain’ or small piece.

Definitions in clues are underlined

As the solve progresses, a number of oversized answers will emerge, all sharing a particular feature, and it will become clear how they need to be consistently modified to fit with the checking entries, even if you don’t at this point understand exactly why. If, like me, you are broadly familiar with the composer but not his works, Google and Wikipedia will fill in any gaps, the song and the common feature helping to narrow the search down nicely. Finding the two key words in the grid is unlikely to detain you long.

The extra difficulty associated with the various gimmicks was balanced out to an extent by wordplays which were in the main straightforward. That said, most of the misprints were of the ‘find the answer and work back’ sort. Solvers of a mathematical bent will find that ‘approaching halfway’ equates to 37.5% complete, while those who solved ‘Nob’ a few weeks back may feel that this puzzle could be described as ‘school of Vismut’. And ChatGPT? Well, none of the eight suggestions was correct, but I thought it was a highly creditable effort.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾 (Suitable for those with limited barred puzzle experience, although the misprinted definitions are challenging)

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