First Intermissions: Twenty-One Great Operas Explored, Explained, and Brought to Life from the Met

Listeners to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts will be familiar with the wonderful talks that Father Owen Lee has given once or twice a season over the past two decades. These essays are largely either transcriptions or, perhaps, more detailed revisions of those talks by Father Lee, a classics professor at the University of Toronto specializing in Vergil. If you, as I did, found those talks wonderful, but didn't record them, this book (and his other work on Wagner) is a godsend. Lee's skill as an essayist, blending profound literary, psychological and artistic insights with some personal recollections, is absolutely of the first order. This is as fine a collection of its sort as is available on the market. It certainly should not be out of print.