This book is intended to be, above all, about other people, not about me. Nevertheless, the account I have presented of my working life among those other people will inevitably have raised some questions about how I have handled the responsibilities of the critical role. One such question concerns the position I have taken on the thorny issue of directorial methods in opera, adumbrated in chapter 4, with recurring references later in the book. The question of what critical principles I may have followed during more than five decades in the profession is another.

With regard to opera direction, and specifically to the vogue for what is called “Regietheater,” the best way to amplify and clarify my views is, I think, to reproduce here two minimally edited reviews originally written for the “Seen and Heard” section of MusicWeb International (www. musicweb-international.com). The first, from 2008, takes a tough line on the depradations that one Chicago production inflicted on Mozart's Don Giovanni. The second, from 2013, will show, I hope, that I am not so hidebound in my opinions as to be unable to recognize valid directorial creativity when I see it.

Mozart: Don Giovanni. Chicago Opera Theater, soloists, cond. Jane Glover, dir. Diane Paulus, set designer Riccardo Hernandez, costume designer David Woolard, lighting designer Aaron Black. Harris Theater, Chicago, April 30, 2008.

For about the first twenty-four hours after witnessing this deplorable travesty inflicted on a great work of music theater, my head was spinning with recollections of its manifold absurdities. It was one of those productions of the sort justly and cogently lamented by Heather Mac Donald in her article “The Abduction of Opera,” published in the summer 2007 issue of New York's City Journal, which I urge on your attention. To enumerate some of the more egregious pieces of nonsense:

The setting was a sleazy nightclub; Giovanni—to give him the honorific “Don” would be ridiculous—was represented as its owner; but when Anna called for help in the opening scene (having already been shown to us in enthusiastic sexual congress with her supposed attacker), who should turn out to be in attendance at the same establishment but her father, who emerged from presumably having it off in a back room with one of the many scantily clad females who gyrated around the stage all evening, endlessly drinking, and humping with any available male.