First Intermissions

As many as eight to ten million music lovers in the United States, Canada, and Europe have heard the moving words of Father Owen Lee during the first intermissions of the Saturday afternoon operas broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His illuminating, intensely personal, immediately accessible half hours on the air have brought grateful letters by the thousand from both first-time listeners and veterans of fifty years of Met broadcast listening, from professors of music, art, literature, psychology, and science as well as from the general public. Now First Intermissions makes available for the first time in print, twenty-one of Father Lee's finest radio talks, analyses of some of the best loved operas in the repertoire, including masterworks by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss. This is a book that brims full with opera lore, with the love of fine music, and with an abundance of good humor. Above all, it relates opera to the human condition, to our capacity for good and evil, our sorrows and joys, our myths and beliefs, our personal triumphs and tragedies. Here are new ways of understanding the problem of evil in Verdi's Othello, the quest for self-realization in Wagner's Parsifal, the sense of Virgilian tears in Berlioz's Les Troyens, the irreversibility of time in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. . Each of these "first intermissions" explores a new idea with uncommon insight and clarity. Each relates opera to life. Aida, Lohengrin, Faust, and La Boheme are all, for Father Lee, dramas that sing of "the love and tears of great-hearted people who, we think humbly when the music is done, are not all that different from ourselves."