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Mussorgsky in the Extreme

In the introduction to the two issues that make up the project “Opera in the Americas/ American Opera,” Daniel Herwitz noted that “Opera was for me, growing up outside of Boston in the early 1960s, the Met’s Sunday broadcast with Milton Cross’s avuncular, plummy accent. The perfume of his voice was that of high culture par excellence, bottled: the culture of the American grand tour (we open in Venice, and then to Verona, all the way to the Metropolitan Opera House, New York).” The following piece by Gaither Stewart sets out from a similar and similarly lasting recollection. Stewart is a journalist and writer who lives in Italy. He worked for some of the Cold War years in Munich among the emigration from the USSR. In his account, the experience of opera is far removed from the opera house—the bodies and voices in his piece are displaced and deprived, their MC a man of mystery. Stewart’s piece is admittedly at some geographic remove from the immediate concerns of this volume. But its meditation on opera’s shotgun marriage with the material privations and manifold disorientations in the aftermath of World War II—opera not so much In the Americas as Beyond Borders—struck the editors as illuminating and apt. Our thanks to Michael P. Steinberg for bringing it to our attention.