TESUQUE, New Mexico - A night at the opera - this opera anyway - isn't quite in the same league as the Marx Brothers' 1930s classic "A Night at the Opera." For one thing, the music wafting across the hills and bouncing off the distant Jemez Mountains is decidedly better. Although Harpo probably could have held his own (strings) in the orchestra pit, and maybe Chico at a piano.

Even the Philistine, Groucho, might have been softened by the setting as another glorious sunset spray-paints acres of magnificent New Mexican clouds. There's no extra charge for such, a hearty dose of nature in the role of the opera's warm-up act. Moonglow and spirited thunderstorms are frequently included.

For a half-century the Santa Fe Opera has given virtually alfresco performances during the summer season at its rural abode in the neighboring village of Tesuque. Open on the sides, the house, seating 2100, is a rare summer delight, air-cooled by agreeable native air. La Scala should have it so good. In the diminishing light of nightfall, the dimming clouds sometimes resemble a dark string of boxcars moving across the horizon.

Soon these visual distractions of the countryside are blacked out, the orchestra is up to tune and full attention is given the stage and the main event.

Growing up on a nearby hardscrabble ranch, my roomie, Aurelio, often heard the operas at home - "if the wind was right. Then, the price was right, too." Once in a while, she says, crooning coyotes were known to upstage human sopranos. But now, returning annually for a "desperately necessary" New Mex fix, she takes in the operas as a ticket-holding witness.

This year we saw two of the five productions: Richard Strauss's "Daphne" and Tan Dun's "Tea: a Mirror of the Soul." The other three were Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutti," Puccini's "La Boheme" and Rameau's "Platee." It was quite a stretch from a traditional, bygone German composer, Strauss, to a present-day Chinese, Tan Dun, but both works were imaginatively, brilliantly done. You never know quite what the way-out-there Tan Dun is up to, but it works beautifully.

Once, attending a home base concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, we were treated to a Tan Dun piece that included a lineup of gongs and a percussionist rubbing his hands in a bowl of water. Didn't see any soap so I guess he wasn't freshening up before dinner.

Water was also put to operatic use, fascinatingly, in "Tea." Large bowls filled with it were played like conga drums by bare-handed percussionists. Slap-happy? No. They brought forth new, strange - but lively - sounds, complementing the singers in a stunningly presented oriental drama, based on a myth concerning tea.. I wonder what the great jazz drummer, Max Roach, could have done with a couple of pails of H2O. Too bad he and Tan Dun never got together before Max's recent death.

Redheaded soprano, Erin Wall, a Canadian, was splendid in the title role of "Daphne." Hers was a sweet and durable voice heard almost non-stop throughout the 100 minutes of the one-act performance. The moral was: mortals shouldn't mix with gods.

The mix led to Daphne's romantic problems, especially in the form of the sun god, Apollo, sung by Scott McAllister. He zoomed in from Olympus, hot-blooded sunny, and intent on hooking up with her. Flattered, but wanting only to be just friends, she pulled off an escape from his clutches that Houdini would have admired. Daphne disappeared by turning into a tree, a nifty bit of stagecraft, leaving Apollo gasping and grasping the branches in vain.

This transformation seems a bizarre turn-down - but, remember, it's opera. "Anything goes in opera as long as the music's OK," says my friend Joyce Ai.

Well before the opera established itself among the prairie dogs and the tourists - centuries before, in fact - the originals in these parts, the Pueblo Indians, were serious performers at Ceremonial dance throughout the year. Corn dances, prayers for rain to nurture their crops, are held in August. Aurelio is partial to the dance at the Santo Domingo Pueblo because she took part for several years as a little girl. Very rare for a paleface, unheard of today, possible only because her father had close friends within the tribe and she had an Indian God-mother.

An extremely hot, dusty day on the reservation, 23 miles south of Santa Fe, didn't discourage the dancers, a cast of hundreds, going through the ritual patiently, proudly for hours. Practically all day men, women and children of all shapes and ages shuffled slowly up and down the plaza - a rectangle of about 200 by 40 yards. A male chorus moved with them, chanting prayers, while a large drum sounded at a hauntingly slow beat. Various sizes of bells and tortoise shells jingled on the timelessly-garbed bare-chested men in white kilts. The long-haired women in black hand-woven dresses. All wearing their best turquoise, coral and silver jewelry and carrying boughs of freshly cut pinon branches. Presiding over the dancers, the koshare, fearsomely body-painted in black and white representing spirits from the underworld were both terrifying and entertaining.

Spectators from outside the pueblo crowded against the walls of the plaza buildings while the residents had the best seats on the flat roofs. A festive time blended the sacred and the commercial. The small church of Santo Domingo, freshly whitewashed and trimmed in orange and blue, was an attraction as were many booths offering Indian jewelry and spicy foods.

As the days passed, Aurelio was getting her New Mex fix: the opera, a corn dance, inimitable clouds and mountains, museum-going. And visiting her brother, noted artist Ford Ruthling, whose handsome Santa Fe garden is a mecca for hummingbirds. But her pilgrimage to "Mudville," the capital of adobe structures, wouldn't be deliciously complete without grub time at Santa Fe's Guadalupe Café, a few blocks from the heart of town. Small, unimposing but long-enduring, the Guadalupe is her den of addiction to comestibles hotter than Mephistopheles' sauna or an arsonist's piece de resistance. Injections of fiery red and green chili come from the kitchen of "Incendiary Isabel" -- owner-chef Isabel Koomoa. As the plates of chili-drenched cheese enchiladas, the flautas, blue corn tortillas, and the huevos rancheros arrive and are devoured, a beatific smile crosses Aurelio's face. She is on a trip as high as the nearby Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

I'm pleased for her, but make mine a nice cup of tea from the opera of the same name.

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