Hugo Weisgall was born in Czechoslovakia in 1912, and came to the United States in 1920. He lived for many years in Baltimore, and since the 1960s has lived on Long Island. He has a Ph.D. in German literature from Johns Hopkins, and is a graduate of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. During World War II, he was assistant United States military attache to governments-in-exile in London, and later was cultural attache in Prague. He has taught at the Juilliard School and Queens College, and far many years has been on the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary. His operas include The Tenor (1949-50), The Stronger (1952), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1956), Athaliah (1963), Nine Rivers from Jordan (1968), Jenny or the Hundred Nights (1976), and Gardens of Adonis (1981). He has been composer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome, and is a member of the ‘National Institute of Arts and Letters.

I have been composing operas for the better part of forty years. For me to pretend to write objectively about New York’s operatic life, let alone to view it with Olympian detachment, is somewhat fatuous. I am too viscerally involved. When I came here some twenty-five years ago, opera in America was almost synonymous with New York; there was no other place to go. That, certainly, is not true today. Were I a young, aspiring opera composer bent on making a career, I would think very hard before coming to New York and would