Music Appreciation: Menotti’s The Consul
Gian Carlo Menotti‘s opera The Consul takes place in an unidentified European totalitarian country, where a political dissident on the run from the secret police tells his wife Magda to go to the consul and apply for a visa to leave, and he will wait to cross the border until his wife, mother and child are safe. Patricia Neway as Magda will break your heart in this depiction of bureaucracy at its most Kafkaesque. (1960, sung in English with subtitles, 2 hours.)