Letter from Philadelphia

Opera in Philadelphia sure isn’t what it used to be. Back in my relative boyhood, in November 1969, I hopped aboard a Trailways bus in New Haven and five hours later alighted, for the first time, in the historic birthplace of American independence. But it wasn’t patriotism that inspired my pilgrimage; it was, of course, opera—a then-rare opportunity to see Verdi’s . Never mind that the sets had been borrowed from a never-revived Met production of 1960, the generic costumes from a Broadway costume house, or that I was sitting way, way up in the Amphitheater. This was the fabled Academy of Music—America’s oldest continuously functioning opera house, opened in 1857, with its penny-plain brick-and-brownstone facade concealing a fabulously ornate auditorium. I’d never been to Italy, but this was what I imagined its great opera palaces must be like—a feeling that only escalated when a fellow , up even higher than me, rewarded Elena Souliotis for a cracked top note with a resonant “Porca!”—for which, in case anyone missed the point, he “Pig!” I was, I guess you could say, in pig heaven.