From the low life, makings of high art

LONDON - For all its chandeliers-and-Champagne style, opera has long enjoyed a voyeuristic interest in low life. Half its heroines are fallen women, briefly flourishing in sin and paying in the end. But opera's love affair with sleaze took on a new dimension when Anna Nicole Smith, the buxom Playboy centerfold and tabloid-culture princess (who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2007) took to the lyric stage.