First Intermissions: Twenty-One Great Operas Explored, Explained, and Brought to Life from the Met

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Opera Essays
Review: Listeners to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts will be familiar with the wonderful talks that Father Owen Lee has given once or twice a season over the past two decades. These essays are largely either transcriptions or, perhaps, more detailed revisions of those talks by Father Lee, a classics professor at the University of Toronto specializing in Vergil. If you, as I did, found those talks wonderful, but didn't record them, this book (and his other work on Wagner) is a godsend. Lee's skill as an essayist, blending profound literary, psychological and artistic insights with some personal recollections, is absolutely of the first order. This is as fine a collection of its sort as is available on the market. It certainly should not be out of print.