...al fine: Special Correspondence Section: Tributes to Tom Glasow

In this space, which at one and the same time concludes both the twentieth volume and the Glasow era ofThe Opera Quarterly, Tom's colleagues remember him with a ff ection and gratitude.

It is with extreme sadness that I am trying to come to grips with the untimely death of Tom Glasow, editor of The Opera Quarterly, who succumbed after a long battle with cancer, though not without "fighting the good fight." Always one to put up a good front and see the glass of life as at least half-full, Tom bore the struggle with grace and a remarkable absence of complaint. He continued to shoulder his editorial duties, producing issue upon issue of a scholarly journal dedicated both to quality and to this art form that we so love.

Alas, like the relentless armies of Fate in Mahler's Sixth Symphony, the cancer cells kept regrouping, advancing and counterattacking against the best that medical science could muster. Looking at some of Tom's valedictory issues of The Opera Quarterly, one would be hard-pressed to find any hint of the life-and-death ordeal in which he was engaged, one that he dealt with in his usual gentlemanly fashion.

Few editors can have been more kindly and supportive, nor more endlessly patient with tardy contributors like myself. Modest to a fault, Tom never let extraneous issues interfere with the work. Most editors would probably have given up after two drafts of a difficult story, but Tom was made of better stuff than that.

Although he seemed to have time for everybody, Tom also shepherded a remarkable body of work to completion, including numerous translations of foreign-language texts (many of them for Amadeus Press). In fact, he did so many that sometimes he could barely remember details of this one or that (a book about Olivier Messiaen, for instance).

He also covered the regional opera scene≺mostly in upper New York State, but sometimes further afield for Opera News. (An early byline, reporting on a revival of Merry Mount starring Chester Ludgin [Chet was another recent cancer casualty, which he also coped with gallantly] and conducted by the composer, was misprinted as "E. Thomas Glasgow.")

I can honestly say that Tom was the nicest man I never met. Plans to do so, particularly on the occasion of Carlo Bergonzi's Opera Orchestra of New York Otello, tended to come a-cropper. Whoever inherits his mantle will have an exceedingly difficult act to follow, a class act. It feels as though an enormous hole has been charred in some of our lives. The knowledge that he is beyond earthly pain and suffering is only a small consolation.

I'm told that this was National Friendship Week. Many of us are now one friend the poorer. However, we have Tom's example to show us how to be a good friend to others. In that, as in his work, He leaves us with a lofty example to which to aspire.

David McKee

The above comments were originally posted to two discussion lists, WM-L and Krakatoa-L, immediately after Tom's death on 15 June 2004.

When it happened, I hardly knew what to think, or to say, about the death of Tom Glasow. Ours was largely a telephone friendship: rather formal and yet with an element of the personal because of our abiding passion for opera, differently as we approached the subject. Most of my other professional friendships are e-mail friendships, and a few of those are rather intimate in their way, even though we may never have met. Over the years almost everything, musical or otherwise, can get discussed, examined, explored. But Tom was, I think, a quite private person: his e-mails were genial but essentially informational. It was on the telephone that I sensed the quiet warmth of the man, and his devotion to the...