Quarter Notes

With this, the winter 2004 issue, The Opera Quarterly embarks on the publication of its twentieth volume. A benchmark achievement, one might say, even though our two decades of existence don't compare to the longevity of other leading English-language opera periodicals, such as Opera News (celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this year) or the British Opera (founded by the late Lord Harewood at mid-century). In any case, we are pleased to have a publisher that believes in us and gives us continued hope for the future of this treasured periodical. Recent subscribers interested in investigating past issues of this journal should have no trouble finding anything from volume 15 on by contacting Oxford University Press Journals at jnlorders@oupjournals.org or through our Web site (see cover). These days volumes 1 through 14 are most easily found on the shelves of music libraries, unless one is lucky enough to run across individual issues in second-hand book shops or at private book sales.

The current issue opens with a bird's-eye view of the role of the law in opera, a survey by attorney DANIEL F. TRITTER. Then, after serving up his chronicles of the U.S. performance history of Giuseppe Verdi's Oberto, Un giorno di regno, and Nabucco, GEORGE MARTIN returns to enlighten us with his survey of the fourth opera in the Verdi canon, I Lombardi alla prima crociata. Not one but two major articles on the operas of Wagner ensue: the first, an examination by GRAHAM G. HUNT of the role of Ortrud in Lohengrin, offers some interesting musicological insight into a character generally regarded as little more than a one-dimensional, old-fashioned villainess; the second is a fascinating study by LINDA FEUERZEIG that brings out the often overlooked significance of the goddess Erda in the Ring. Our final feature article, by DANIEL P. KESSLER, evokes the formidable art of Boston opera mega-director Sarah Caldwell by focusing on her delightfully imaginative 1978 staging of Donizetti's Don Pasquale, the cast of which featured Beverly Sills.

In this post-September 11, war-torn, terrorist-threatened, economically-crippled,

airline-unfriendly, disease-ridden world we inhabit, there seems to be less incentive than ever for the serious opera lover to travel to major operatic centers and greater motivation to investigate what some of the smaller local (i.e., within a day's driving distance) companies are producing for us these days. Your upstate New York-based editor's own home-turf investigations over the past couple of years have included some enjoyable visits to Syracuse, Saratoga Springs, Cooperstown, Chautauqua, and, just over the international border, nearby Ontario, Canada, in addition to sampling some adventurous productions by the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music opera department. The Syracuse Opera, which this coming season will be presenting for the first time in twelve years all home-grown productions (as opposed to a mix of home and touring productions), demonstrated its ability to take on a challenge successfully when it gave the local premiere of Verdi's Macbeth last spring (see fig.1); conducted by Steven White and staged by Stephanie Sundine, the opera received an idiomatic reading from a largely capable cast (including a truly knock-out performance by—surprise, surprise!—the Macduff, sung by Drew Slatton, an up-and-coming tenor surely to keep an eye on). In Saratoga Springs, a recent Lake George Festival offered Richard Strauss's Ariadne aufNaxos (starring Brenda Harris) in a theater of little greater than postage-stamp dimensions, drawing the spectator into the music and the dramatic action to a degree quite impossible in a hall the size of the Met.