The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera

A user's guide to opera—Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" (TheNew York Times Magazine), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice, and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of opera

From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in th...