Quarter Notes

To paraphrase Erika in Samuel Barber's Vanessa, must the winter end so soon? Thus the sentiment of your editor, inevitably faced with the impending deadline for the spring issue of The Opera Quarterly!

We begin with two very different articles on Verdi: first, an analysis of some infrequently noticed musical resemblances between Verdi's La traviata and Auber's Le Domino noir leads RODNEY STENNING EDGECOMBE to believe that Verdi must have had more than a passing familiarity with the Frenchman's score—certainly more than the majority of us has today. And in another of his informative series tracing Verdian performance history in the United States, GEORGE MARTIN turns to the composer's fifth opera, the 1844 Ernani.

Regular readers of OQ may be surprised to see a major article by the late JIM MCPHERSON, a frequent and well-loved contributor to these pages until his untimely death in November 2002. As luck would have it, the torso of his major study on the history of the United States' "National Opera," founded by one of Jim's fellow Canadians in the 1930s, has been brought as near completion as humanly possible by one very talented and devoted Howard Sanner, and kindly made available for publication in OQ by Jim's heirs. Surely we are blessed to receive such an important piece—direct from the heavens above, it would seem! That this article on the operatic history of our nation's capital should appear during a presidential election year makes it all the more apropos.

Rounding off the features section is a more-than-casual, illustrated discussion by TIMOTHY O. GRAY of the art and recordings of the Bulgarian soprano Anna Tomowa-Sintow, whose impressive forty-year career initially blossomed under the eye of Herbert von Karajan. And another in our series of OperaKrostiks by ALAN W. AGOL ushers in the review sections, featuring a number of unusual items. Enjoy!