In 2004, the Lyric Opera of Chicago celebrated two milestones: its fiftieth anniversary and the premiere of A Wedding. With music and libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer William Bolcom, film director Robert Altman, and Arnold Weinstein, the opera received intense international coverage. Prepremiere articles, major features, interviews, and reviews appeared in Opera Now, Opernwelt, Opera, and Opera Quarterly. The Lyric's A Wedding dominated the August issue of Opera News, occupying the cover and several features, complete with glossy photos of the photogenic young leads dressed in luxurious wedding attire (see Figure 1).

On 9 January 1964, the 86-year-old E. M. Forster took a curtain call at the Covent Garden revival of Billy Budd alongside his colibrettist, Eric Crozier. The Times review of the event neglected to mention either of the librettists, prompting Forster to write:

Italian prima donna Francesca Cuzzoni (ca. 1698–1770) was the first internationally recognized virtuosa to sing high soprano women's roles. Although her work served as a model to the female performers who followed, no in-depth critical study has been written about her groundbreaking career on the opera stage of the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she was the celebrated prima donna from 1723 to 1728. During her tenure, the Royal Academy became one of the most important opera companies in Europe, rivaling those of the Viennese court, the Paris Opera, and the Italian opera houses of Naples and Venice. Her arrival on the London stage signaled a shift in the ways composers set roles in relationship to vocal categories and gender. In particular, Cuzzoni's superior virtuosic vocal abilities influenced and inspired German George Friedrich Handel's (1685–1759) compositional style and his musical treatment of dramatic elements.

Section Editor's Note: For this edition of “Critical Stages,” appearing within the journal's special issue on opera, I posed three sets of questions to Daphne Lei, author of Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity Across the Pacific (2006), and Tony Award–winning director Mary Zimmerman, cocreator with Philip Glass and Arnold Weinstein of the opera Galileo Galilei (2002).

Francis Robinson (1910–80; Figure 1) fell in love with opera the day that a lady wearing a tailored suit, pince-nez, and a bird hat came from the Victor Company to his school to demonstrate the Victrola. That was the day he first heard Enrico Caruso sing. Later, still a schoolboy and never having heard the tenor in person, Robinson mourned Caruso's death. The beauty and magnificence of opera entranced him, and the celebrity of opera personalities intrigued him. He found his dream home in the Metropolitan Opera. The correspondence, photographs, clippings, programs, memorabilia, and other materials that he received, wrote, and collected during his many decades with the Met reside at Vanderbilt University Special Collections and provide a rich resource for opera scholars.

What might one read for an opera course? I teach an occasional survey that looks at opera in the context of theatre. It is intended to demystify opera for those who have no experience of it but also to explore some nooks and crannies that even fans might not know well. The general layout is chronological, but local production schedules may mean that we start out of order or that there are interruptions. My concern is that students be somewhat prepared when they go to see an opera on the syllabus. Rather than choose warhorses for their own sake, I seek out pieces that offer historical, political, or aesthetic choices that are surprising to many students. Thus, with John Adams's Nixon in China, we also read three plays about Madame Mao. With the intermezzi presented as part of the Medici wedding festivities of 1598, we read one of the plays the intermezzi graced, Bargagli's La pellegrina; for the production process, we read excerpts from James M. Saslow's wonderful 1996 book about the wedding, and so on. I change the overall content to accommodate available productions and to keep the course interesting for me and (I hope) for students. Since I keep an eye out for books that might be useful, this essay combines things I have actually read with things I will consider for the syllabus the next time I teach it.