Opera in the Grand Tradition, along with mah-jongg, seems to be staging a well deserved comeback. In this country, the two guiding lights are, without doubt, Felix Fing and Anna Pulova. Fing, a lean, chiseled, impeccable gentleman of the old school who was once mistaken on the street for Sir Cedric Hardwicke, is responsible for the rediscovery of Verdi's earliest, most raucous opera, Nabisco, a sumptuous bout-de-souffle with a haunting leitmotiv that struck me as being highly reminiscent of the Mudugno version of ``Volare.'' Miss Pulova has a voice that Maria Callas once described as ``like chipping teeth with a screw driver,'' and her round, opalescent face becomes fascinatingly reflective of the emotions demanded by the role of Rosalie.

The Champs Elysees is literally littered this summer with the prostrate bodies of France's beat-up beatnik jeunes filles. Cause of all this commotion: squat, pug-nosed, balding, hopelessly ugly Jean-Pierre Bravado, a Bogartian figure, who plays a sadistic, amoral, philosophic Tasti-Freeze salesman in old New-Waver Fredrico de Mille Rossilini's endlessly provocative film, A Sour Sponge. Bravado has been alternately described as ``a symbol of the new grandeur of France and myself'' (De Gaulle) and ``a decadent, disgusting slob!'' (Norman Mailer), but no one can deny that the screen crackles with electricity whenever he is on it. Soaring to stardom along with him, Margo Felicity Brighetti, a luscious and curvaceously beguiling Italian starlet, turns in a creditable performance as an airplane mechanic.