On March 16, 1950, New York's music and drama critics reported on the premiere of Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Consul, presented the previous evening at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Everyone had something to say about Patricia Neway (1919–2012), the soprano who sang the role of Magda Sorel. Neway “stands out as a singing actress of unusual power,” wrote Virgil Thomson in the New York Herald Tribune. Olin Downes was more voluble, describing to readers of the New York Times how Neway's “warm, brilliant voice and spirit, and feeling for her role, enabled her to give the fullest interpretive value to every note and every word, whether it was of sustained melody or graphic recitative. The climax of her nobly fashioned aria … at the end of the second act simply stopped the show for minutes, and overwhelmed the audience.” With Neway at the helm, The Consul did indeed “overwhelm” audiences. It ran on Broadway for eight straight months, racking up a total of 269 performances and winning both the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Music and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical.

The year 1950 proved to be a strange and difficult one in the US. As historian J. Ronald Oakley pointed out, “never had the nation been more powerful, but not since the early dark days of World War II had the American people felt so puzzled and so threatened by world events.” “Everywhere,” Oakley continued, “there was talk of Joseph Stalin and the Russians, of the ‘loss of China,’ of a communist plot to rule the world, of the Cold War and World War III, of subversives in the State Department, colleges and universities, entertainment industry, and no telling where else.” The Consul spoke to US audiences during this uncertain time—and interestingly, it managed to do so across what many perceived to be a longstanding cultural divide. Menotti was anxious about billing The Consul as an opera, and he ultimately chose to call the piece a “musical drama” to avoid the stigma that he believed accompanied the word “opera” in the US. Yet despite Menotti’s trepidation, many viewers immediately and enthusiastically understood The Consul to be an opera. Downes proudly invoked the “o” word when he congratulated Menotti, stating that the “opera” had “eloquence, momentousness, and intensity of expression unequaled by any native composer.”