Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

The clues...
Requests for help should normally include the clue itself, the number of letters in the answer, and details of any you already have. Any additional information or special instructions, common in Listener puzzles, should also be included.
Hints only, please, no answers.

The theme...
Help with the theme may also be sought here. The help given should be fairly gentle in nature - just a nudge, a pointer in the right direction, and certainly not anything that would spoil the puzzle for others. Any posts which, even inadvertently, reveal too much of the theme are likely to be removed.
If you feel a post IS overly revealing, please let Norah, site administrator know - Norah.evoluted@aol.com. She likes to err on the side of caution, so anything at all 'iffy' will be removed!

The Listener is a unique puzzle and should be treated with respect.

Excellent stuff, this, from Mozart. All works out extremely nicely.

I'm quite enjoying it but there's some liberties being taken with 16a for example, unless I'm barking up the wrong tree. That y is a consonant in that answer.

Don’t think so, think y is a vowel throughout

I have solved some of normal clues and my answers have the number of letters indicated by the figures in brackets. However, the second sentence of the preamble suggests that the entry could have a different number of letters. If that is the case, thus is going to a very difficult puzzle to solve. Can anyone confirm whether or not the the figures in brackets indicate the entry lengths?

The pairs are symmetric so will have the same number of letters.

The numbers in brackets are the length of clue answers not necessarily the entries

All done but I have an ambiguity in the entry to 22dn with nothing to resolve it...

I think smellyharry's point is that in some words Y is indeed a consonant so it's dodgy to have such a word as an answer and then not have a y in the CE. For example, if an answer were YOUR it would be dodgy to have the CE be ARE.

16acr is an example of this.

So we are to treat Y as a vowel whether it is or not...

Thanks Candledave (at 6). I should have spotted that.

I agree that there is an ambiguity in 22dn, and I can’t see a way to resolve it.

Also, I’m not philosophically opposed to &lit. clues, but I believe there should be an indicator. There are a few such clues in the puzzle, but exclamation points are used inconsistently.

Otherwise, an interesting puzzle.