Ages ago, I acquired two recordings that inspire a feeling of weirdness whenever I listen to them, or even think about them. Both are performances of the great Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady in languages other than English. Each of them has a special twist of irony. At the core of the original story is how the coarse Cockney girl Liza Doolittle is as a challenge, taken in by the insufferably smug but utterly enthralled professor Henry Higgins, and through painful exercises — “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain” — acquires such an impeccably upper-class Oxbridge way of speaking English that at her (and his) ultimate test, a posh ball that she attends incognito, drifting among the cream of British society, the keenest linguistic sleuth in the land dances with this mysterious beauty and in the end declares her too good to be true, and hence not English elite at all, but Hungarian! The whole idea of de-anglicizing this story strikes me as really nutty — and yet there they are, those recordings on my shelf. And so, on what wet plains do those heavy, drenching rains mainly fall, in Mi Bella Dama? (…)