Historian and Scholar Philip
Gossett
A Conversation with Bruce Duffie
Philip Gossett, Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Emeritus Professor
of Music, is a music historian with special interests in 19th-century Italian
opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice.
He is author of two books on Donizetti and of Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera
(2006, Chicago), which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological
Society as the best book on music of the year. He serves as General Editor
of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (The
University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi of Milan) and of Works of Gioachino Rossini (Baerenreiter-Verlag,
Kassel). One of the world's foremost experts on Italian opera, Gossett is
the first musicologist to be awarded the Mellon Distingushed Achievement Award;
he also holds the Cavaliere di Gran Croce,
the Italian government's highest civilian honor. Professor Gossett has served
as President of the American Musicological Society and of the Society for
Textual Scholarship, as Dean of Humanities at Chicago, and as lecturer and
consultant at opera houses and festivals in America and Italy. He was the
musicological consultant to the Verdi Festival in Parma during the Verdi centennial
year (2001). He has been at the University of Chicago since 1968.
-- From the University of Chicago
website
|
Living in Chicago has always been exciting for many reasons, not the least
of which are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Being brought up with these two giants as well as myriad chamber groups made
for a wonderful life — not just for
me, though I would selfishly like to think so, but for anyone and everyone
who lives or visits here. So it is fitting that Chicago is
also home to the scholar who is editing the new editions of the operas of
Verdi and Rossini, Philip Gossett.
Besides being ensconced at the University of Chicago, Gossett has given
his time and expertise to the publishers of these new scores.
In June of 1988, when the work was in full swing, I was able to have a
wonderful chat with Gossett. He was frank and earnest about his work
and his ideas, and we simply discussed many of the topics of mutual interest.
Much of what was said appeared in an issue of The Opera Journal, and now it has been
slightly re-edited and gains new life on this webpage. The photos have
been added, as have the links which refer to my interviews elsewhere on my
website.
Here is that conversation . . . . . . . . .
Bruce Duffie:
You’ve done a lot of work with the scholarship of Verdi, and are now involved
with the new edition published by the University of Chicago and the House
of Ricordi. How much alteration is there in the new scores from what’s
been used for all these years?
Philip Gossett:
It varies, of course, from score to score. On some occasions, the
differences are small. We like to think that even though they are small,
for the performers the differences are palpable. The performers know
where they are, and are used to other notes and rhythms and words.
Occasionally they will come to us and ask how we know that our version is
correct, and in some cases we do know that Verdi did approve or even want
a change here or there. He even made occasional mistakes and corrected
them! But in many cases, the differences arose because of errors by
copyists, or failure to read what the manuscript said.
BD: Is Verdi’s
manuscript particularly hard to read?
PG: No, it’s not that hard. It’s not like
Beethoven or Janáček, but unless you know the autographs very well,
you can be misled. There are many places where there are changes in
Verdi’s own hand, and it’s important to know them from changes made by somebody
else. Some of the most interesting changes are done for reasons of censorship.
BD: Is there
any possibility that you are restoring a version that Verdi decided was better
after the change, even if it’s by another hand?
PG: We always
worry about that, and we try to get it right. We don’t have Verdi to
tell us what’s right and what’s wrong, and to an extent we have to penetrate
the whole process. There are scholars who work on textual questions
in literature, who are becoming more and more aware of putting into historical
perspective the whole history of the text. In some cases we know why
the changes were made. Perhaps the most famous is in Rigoletto. The Duke comes to the
inn in the last act and orders from Sparafucile two things right away.
He always used to say “una stanza e del
vino” (a room and some wine). At this, Rigoletto turns to Gilda
and says, “You see what a terrible man he is!” In fact, the Duke’s words
were never Verdi’s. He never put them in himself. His score and
the sketch are very clear “Tua sorella e
del vino” (your sister and some wine). That line makes Rigoletto’s
remark much more reasonable. The change was made by the censor.
Verdi’s words are crossed out in the autograph and the new words are written
in. So Verdi himself led a production with the new words, and everybody
has been singing those new words for all these years, but it is our feeling
that it is not what Verdi wanted.
BD: Would this
be a case where the stage director would have the Duke grab Maddalena while
singing “una stanza” to indicate
slyly the original intent?
PG: She’s not
onstage yet, but directors can do all kinds of things like that. In
this case, however, it seems clear to me that there is no reason to do anything
but what Verdi originally wrote. Other cases are more problematic.
The end of Ernani has two texts in
the autograph, and one is a great deal more powerful than the other.
It’s the one he originally wrote. I’ve worked with the autograph and
can tell you it’s best described as some half-hearted attempt by Verdi to
put in some different words. They’re not written throughout, just a
few hints. But it’s that half-hearted attempt which ended up in the
printed vocal score, and from which the opera was learned. Ernani was not published in full-score
until ours appeared. We don’t have evidence, but it seems as if the
original text was objected to, again, by censors. It’s the moment when
Ernani expects total happiness, but he hears the horn and has to kill himself.
The original text is “È questa per
noi miseri, Del cielo la pietà.” (This is the pity that
heaven feels for us poor miserable ones.) It’s a very powerful line,
and has the kind of power that is almost blasphemous. It is changed
to “Non ebbe di noi miseri, Non ebbe il
ciel pietà.” (Heaven had no pity on us poor ones.)
The whole way the line is sung has to be affected by that change in the
text.
BD: Was he perhaps
thinking of possible problems with the censors, or do we know?
PG: We don’t
know that. Censorship or self-censorship is very problematic.
In this case, perhaps the impresario in the theater thought they’d better
watch out for trouble, and suggested that it be softened a little.
Verdi was always willing to make some compromises, but not if they changed
the basic sense of the story. His artistic conscience allowed him to
go a certain distance in order to get the work performed, so in this case
we offered both texts. In the score, we put the alternative and explained
the situation in the introduction, and will let each producer make a choice.
A third case arises in Nabucco.
The entire text of the big chorus at the end was changed. Verdi’s hand,
we believe, simply blotted out the original words. It took some fancy
footwork, but we finally reconstructed the entire version of text, and it
is really very powerful. Not only that, but it makes sense with the
music which the revised version doesn’t. The text we all know goes,
“You spread a rainbow, everybody is smiling; You cast a thunderbolt, man is
no more.” The music under the word “smiling” is about as un-smiling
as you’ve ever heard. The original text goes, “Often to your people,
you gave tears; But you broke the chains of those who believed in you.”
So the sad music supports the word “tears.” Is this a censorial change?
We don’t have any evidence. Nabucco
was later considered a very patriotic opera, but it doesn’t seem to have
been such immediately. The fact is we just don’t know the answer, and
it’s doubly complicated because when he made these changes in the text and
the music, he also made some musical changes that are really improvements.
So to just do the ‘original’
version will gain some powerful statements, but also lose some improvements
in the score. So we give both versions and let the producers decide
how to present it. We may put a re-constructed amalgam as an appendix
and call it a suggestion, but it cannot go into the full score. It’s
important to always bear in mind these different possibilities, to not presume
too much, and to try to understand the history of a problem. Gradually
you come up with a text you can believe in.
BD: Is there
any chance that Verdi is looking at your efforts and thinking he would have
made things even more powerful before changing them, knowing that you would
put them right eventually?
PG: When I work
with the Rossini operas I often feel he’s sitting over my shoulder, and every
once in a while he tells me what he really wants. Verdi’s scores are
generally very beautifully written and very clearly marked. With care
and attention, I think one can come close to resolving most of the problems
in a responsible and musically correct way. We had a wonderful experience
with Luisa Miller which was done
in Cincinnati under the direction of James Conlon. He
took the operation very seriously and went through the score with the greatest
detail. My colleagues who were there told me he was simply delighted
with the opportunity of being able to see exactly what Verdi had written,
and commented that corrections made clear problems that had puzzled him all
along. A musician looks at a score and wonders about something, but
there is no court of last resort short of going to the autograph. If
the edition doesn’t discuss things and make it all clear, they have no way
of knowing if the pages they’re working with are accurate. I believe
in the performer coming face to face with the work. What I don’t believe
in is the performer having to come face to face with something that is not
the work, or what he thinks is the work but really isn’t. I believe
in the genius of the composer. These are people who were very special,
and they had something very special to tell us. That’s why I think
critical editions are so important. They allow us to get that message
as closely as we’re ever going to get it.
BD: Do you view
these new scores as the end, or a beginning? Do you see them as jumping
off places for conductors and producers?
PG: That’s exactly
what they are. When people say they’re performing the ‘Critical
Edition’, I say that’s impossible. We reconstruct
Verdi’s scores and try very hard to make clear what we think his intention
is. However, if you ask me what a certain accent mark means, I respond
that there are hundreds of ways of performing an accent. No musicologist
can say to a performer that this mark means exactly such-and-so. Verdi
couldn’t have said it. Every performer breathes differently, holds a
bow differently, etc.
BD: But the fact
that there might be two different kinds of marks means that there will be
a differentiation.
PG: Exactly!
It suggests how one should go about thinking about a passage. These
are things that may have been lost in earlier scores, or were put together
in ways that made no sense. In one of the duets in Rigoletto, Verdi uses two kinds of accents
— one upright, the other horizontal. How do you render them?
Muti will do it one way, Levine another, Conlon still another. The important
thing is that it’s there, and that it be clearly marked in ways that allow
the performer to make use of that as part of an interpretation of the music.
It’s only by having that kind of detail carefully spelled out that one can
really begin to work in that way. It’s my hope that this is what the
Critical Edition allows performers to do.
BD: Is it safe
to assume that Verdi put more markings into his scores than, say, Bellini
and Donizetti?
PG: The only
things that those earlier composer left unwritten were the ornamentation,
the variations that singers were expected to apply to the music themselves.
BD: Wasn’t there
a more standardized convention of what constituted proper operatic performance
in the earlier years?
PG: Yes and no.
Certainly by the time you get to the later operas of Verdi, the extent of
the information he provides is greater because, as you suggest, the range
of his demands is more than had been expected in his youth. But the
level of the earlier time is really greater than we often give it credit for.
We have, I think, misunderstood a great deal of the music of the first half
of the 19th century of Italian opera. It is not ‘singers-opera’,
but rather you need good singers to do it. You can’t do it without
singers who are able to do it, but Bellini didn’t think he was writing opera
just so the singers could canary. That’s not what he was doing.
He left us hundreds of letters spelling out in detail what his music was about
and the kinds of dramatic things he was after, and the formal things he was
dealing with. It is clear that Bellini was a composer who thought he
was doing something original and new, and musically and dramatically significant.
He was, but what we tend to hear are canaries who think that if you warble
this stuff, somehow or another you’ve captured the spirit of it. We’ve
had too many terrible performances of bel
canto operas by divas who don’t know that these are dramas.
You can argue that the dramatic conventions of Italian romanticism are such
that a modern audience may find more difficult than in earlier periods, but
even that argument is worth re-examination. I found that if they are
done as ‘singer-operas’ you end
up with people coming out saying, “Isn’t she wonderful? It’s a pretty
dull piece.” I was delighted a few years ago [1985] here in Chicago
when Lyric Opera did I Capuleti e i Montecchi.
It was exactly right. They understood the piece and took it seriously,
and wonder of wonders, with fine singers who did their performances within
the context of the work, it worked as a drama. [The cast included Tatiana Troyanos, Cecilia Gasdia, Dennis
O’Neill, and Dimitri Kavrakos, conducted by Donato Renzetti and staged
by Giulio Chazalettes.] And that’s one of the most unlikely of the
operas to work because the audience constantly thinks Shakespeare even when
they shouldn’t. It’s based on one of the Italian sources for Shakespeare.
BD: The conductors
and directors must know about all these editions and details, and certainly
the singers should learn about the ones in the opera they’re singing.
How much do you expect the public to be aware of all this scholarship?
PG: In a real
sense, the public doesn’t have to know about the details. The public
is there wanting to have a wonderful performance. I like to think that
performers who are working with better materials will give better performances
because generally the composer knew better than the people who fixed him
up. Generally, if you have authentic sources, you get musically and
dramatically superior readings. Except for a very few obvious mistakes,
I’ve never seen a secondary source that improves on the original.
BD: How much
does this assume that the operas you’re dealing with are masterpieces?
PG: Since I’m
directly involved with operas of Verdi and Rossini, and to a lesser extent
those of Bellini and Donizetti, I’m willing to argue that at its proper level,
pretty much all of these pieces are masterworks. These are composers
who really knew what they were doing.
BD: Then when
we get used to this kind of scholarship in these works, what happens when
there are productions of lesser operas by weaker composers?
PG: I see what
you’re saying and it’s hard to tell. Certainly if you’re going to perform
an opera by, say, Mercadante, it’s good to know what he wrote. Then,
after you really know the piece, producers will take liberties. They
do that with our editions as well. Our Rossini editions have all of
the secco recitative, but we don’t
really expect people to perform all of that stuff. There are occasions
when it works, others when it won’t. Lyric will be doing my edition
of Tancredi [which would conclude
the 1988-89 season] and I’m working closely with them on it. [The cast
would include Marilyn Horne,
Lella Cuberli, Chris Merritt, Kenneth
Cox, Sharon Graham,
and Robynne Redmon, conducted by Bruno Bartoletti,
staged by John Copley,
and designed by John Conklin.]
One of the first things I did was to cut about half of the secco recitative. Rossini wrote
all of it – or almost all of it – and I say that because he didn’t write a
single note of the recitative in the Barber
of Seville, nor of Cenerentola,
nor of Italiana in Algeri.
He assigned them done by someone else in the theater, and we don’t know who
actually wrote them. But an American audience today, even with the supertitles,
is not going to want to sit through all of those secco recitatives.
* *
* * *
BD: Let me ask
the big philosophical question. What is the purpose of opera?
PG: [Feigning
mortal injury, and both laugh before returning to the topic] Opera
is an art form on the level of the greatest of art forms, and it affects
us as an audience in ways that are close to us at many different levels.
There is the beauty of the music itself, there is the drama which I take
very seriously, working within the conventions of the periods. Without
too much trouble, an audience can put itself in different frames of mind
in order to be able to accept different messages. We react to this
combination of music and drama in a very special way.
BD: Do our reactions
evolve still to this day?
PG: Our reactions change. Remember that for
a long time, the public accepted very little except the very latest operas.
The notion that there was a history of maybe 300 years with each period producing
masterpieces was inconceivable. There was no repertory in the sense
that we think of it. Rossini was one of the very first to have his music
survive. Not a lot of it did, but Barber and Cenerentola and William Tell didn’t completely fall out
of the repertory the way the operas of Cimarosa and Paisielo and Hasse did.
They disappeared completely. The ‘museum situation’
we have today in opera houses allows us to see the whole history simultaneously.
We have a 17th century opera one night, a 19th century opera the next, and
I hope more and more, 20th century operas. I’m somewhat encouraged by
the way audiences respond to some new works. Whether they are operas
I personally love or not is not the point. What is important is that
opera houses continue to make an effort to do the new as well as the old.
BD: Without citing
specific titles, are there works being written lately that are on the level
of Rossini and Verdi?
PG: It’s very
difficult to answer that question today. At the time Rossini was writing,
every theater in Italy — major and often minor
— was committed to playing two or three new operas every year.
That amounts to an enormous number of works, most of which haven’t survived,
and rightly so.
BD: We shouldn’t
dig them up at all?
PG: We can look
at them and see if they’re interesting. Occasionally we will find one
that is. I know a whole bunch of works from the early 19th century that
would be delightful in community or college presentations. More and
more, 18th century operas are being dug up, and we now realize that Vivaldi
knew how to write opera, as did Handel! For a long time, people presumed
that they didn’t, but that just meant we had different criteria of a way theater
should work.
BD: What should
be the percentage of a year’s repertoire of masterworks, and how many from
the next level, and so on?
PG: Rather than
talk about percentage, I would say that a theater should strive to create
a balance of different kinds of works. San Francisco will be opening
their season with our edition of Maometto
II [with Marilyn Horne, Simone Alaimo, Chris Merritt, and June Anderson, conducted
by Alberto Zedda, staged by Sonja Frisell, designed
by Nicola Benois, and the prompter was Joseph De Rugeriis],
then they’ll do The Rake’s Progress
of Stravinsky [with Jerry
Hadley, Susan Patterson, William Shimell, and Victoria Vergara, conducted
by John Mauceri, staged
by John Cox, and designed
by David Hockney], and after that Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. [with Placido Domingo, Shirley Verrett, Justino
Diaz, and Joseph Rouleau, conducted by Maurizio Arena, and staged by Lotfi Mansouri]. What
a great way to start off. Later they’ll do some Puccini and Wagner,
but think of those first three in one season! It’s delightful.
We need to keep up this mixture of the known and unknown, the old unknown
and the new works as well, never forgetting that there are certain works the
public wants to hear over and over again, but rationally.
BD: What are
some of the strains that contribute to making an opera great?
PG: [Pauses a
moment] I hesitate because different works have different kinds of
strengths. What makes a Mozart work great is different from what makes
a Bel Canto work great, or indeed
a 20th century work great. One of the things that I look for, and is
crucial to me, is the interaction of the music and the drama. There
has to be a rightness about the mix no matter what the style. I think
the greatest works are those that create characters that we care about, and
there are many ways of doing that. There is also a level of sophistication
that exists in the best operas. It is something that we can come back
to again and again and never feel we have completely grasped. Mozart’s
comment in a letter to the effect that a certain work will be loved by the
public and also respected by musicians speaks to this idea. It makes
a difference when there are depths to be plumbed.
BD: Is the judgment
of history always right about a work?
PG: Oh no, absolutely
not. There are many reasons why history can be wrong. In the case
of Rossini, I think history was particularly wrong.
BD: [Gently protesting]
We never lost sight of the fact that he was a master.
PG: But we did
lose sight of much of his music, particularly his serious music. I’m
not the only one saying this. Il Viaggio
a Rheins got three performances in the 19th century and then disappeared
forever as far as anybody knew. It’s a wonderful work. A great
deal of Maometto II became the Siege of Corinth, but to my mind, Maometto II is a much more interesting
work. He made the new work because it couldn’t stand the way it was.
Italian audiences were not ready for it, and by increasing certain spectacular
elements — such as ballets, and taking out some of
the more difficult vocal music — he could create a
work that would function at the Paris Opera.
BD: Was he selling
out?
PG: In one sense
you could say he was. He believed in the work so much that he wanted
to make it function on some level. He didn’t have the ego of a Wagner,
who was willing to wait around for 30 years until the work would be performed
again. But getting back to historical judgment, in Verdi’s case, with
one major exception, history has been pretty right. I’m delighted that
we get to hear more of the works now because there isn’t a single work that
doesn’t have something to tell us. The 19th century wasn’t ready for
Don Carlos, and it’s only in the
last few years that we’re discovering what a masterpiece that is.
With all the versions, that is a very difficult opera for the edition.
There is no question that it should be done in French, just as Rossini’s
Guillaume Tell should only be done
in French. The third one like that is Donizetti’s La Favorite, and that’s being prepared,
finally. These works were composed in French and even though Verdi made
an Italian version of some parts, the translation was not by him. He
had to fool around with it because at that time (1868), the idea of doing
an opera in French in Italy didn’t exist. So he had no choice if he
wanted his work to be done there. But everything was translated then
— even Wagner.
BD: Do you believe
in opera-in-translation?
PG: Absolutely.
In our vocal scores, we provide singing translations into English, and some
of them are very good. There are times and places for different kinds
of things. A major international house should do things in the original
language, especially with the supertitles now available.
BD: Will supertitles
mean the death of translations?
PG: I hope not
because it’s a different kind of thing. I adore the conception of St.
Louis Opera and Chicago Opera Theater. They are absolutely right to
do opera in English with direct theatrical values front and center.
I hope there is more and more of that. The translation should make an
effort to duplicate the structure of the original. Every word doesn’t
have to be the same, but the shape must agree. If the line is, “Felicità,
felicità, felicità, felicità,” (happiness) I don’t want
to hear, “And in my ear, I think it’s right, I’m telling you, I love her
so.” That kind of crap is simply unacceptable.
BD: [Trying to
keep the general idea in the exact meter] Do you want, “I’m really glad,
I’m really glad, I’m really glad, I’m really glad?”
PG: You need
to hold onto the structure. The music is conceived in that way to work
with the repeated text. People say you don’t understand the words.
Well, you don’t understand every word, but that’s why in Italian opera there
is a lot of text repetition. When Verdi wanted a word to be understood,
what he called the ‘words that counted’,
you bet he made sure you could understand them. And the fact is that
you can. If you sit in an opera house, the important words come through.
* *
* * *
BD: Where is
opera going today?
PG: I think it’s going in wonderful directions.
I’m very positive about the present state and the future of opera. Some
of my friends constantly lament the lack of singers, but they are really complaining
they were born too late to hear in-person those voices they grew up with
on their 78s. I don’t lament that at all. We have wonderful singers
today both older and younger. There are some problems in the way our
operatic world is constructed, particularly in the way enormous pressure is
put on some singers to fly from one house to the other, and on others to
do too much too soon. But there are many singers who are not allowing
that to happen to them and are not leading that kind of life, and there are
more different works being performed now than at any time in the last 50 years.
The repertory is probably broader now than it has ever been, and that, to
me, is a great, positive sing. The kind of involvement by stage-directors
that we find today is not something to be afraid of. There can be abuses
and things I don’t approve of or don’t like, but the fact that directors
are taking opera seriously is something that I treasure. To have Sir Peter Hall working with
Marriage of Figaro and Salome, or Lubimov doing Lulu gave Chicago wonderful experiences.
Ponnelle is also very exciting, and even though I don’t like some things as
much as others, I respect his ideas, and we’ve worked together at the Rossini
festival in Pesaro. But he has given so much of his time to opera right
along, whereas the others I mentioned work mostly in straight theater.
Peter Sellars gets
me mad at times, but one of the things theater can do is get us mad sometimes!
I don’t mind that as long as he’s not a charlatan and directs without thinking
about the work at all. Then I’m not just disappointed, I’m angry, especially
when the opera is essentially unknown and can be ruined by a production that
doesn’t make any sense.
BD: Do you think
opera works well on audio recordings?
PG: Recordings
have done wonders to make operas known to an enormous public. I grew
up listening to operas on records, but I also grew up standing at the Met,
and that combination was wonderful. In recent years I’ve done less listening
and more reading of scores and trying to go to performances. But the
recordings, and now videos, are wonderful tools. It’s not ideal, but
it’s brought opera to so many parts of the country and the world, and to
people who have never had the opportunity to go in person. More people
can enjoy a broadcast than have ever heard the piece since it was written.
BD: Is opera
for everyone?
PG: I can’t answer
that in any serious way, so I won’t begin to try.
BD: OK, then,
from another angle... Where is the balance in opera between the artistic
achievement and an entertainment value?
PG: It clearly
always is in a state of flux. I hope that treating these works with
the utmost seriousness and respect and really trying to understand them makes
them more entertaining. Our simple enjoyment of them is increased the
more we take them seriously. If we treat them as trifles, they seem
to be just that — trifles.
Attitudes have gone through tremendous changes. Suddenly the depths
of the classic period, for instance, are very real to us. They weren’t
real to every generation.
BD: Were they
real to those who wrote the music?
PG: Oh yes.
BD: What advice
do you have for someone who wants to write operas today?
PG: First of
all, to know opera, to know as much as they can, to hear and to see, to know
theater. All the great opera composers were people who knew theater.
Verdi went to every play he could get to. Wagner directed all kinds
of operas while he was in Riga, getting to know the theater, what it meant
and how it operated. Being involved is crucial. The choice of
libretto and selecting what to represent is fundamental. We live in
a society in which so many things coexist, that the style a composer chooses
to frame the musical ideas doesn’t have to be one thing or another.
One can work in a wide range of stylistic universes, but the important thing
is to master the problems of music and text. Verdi told one of his
librettists that they could not make words or music, but they had to make
it all.
BD: Is this idea
of an opera house having a composer-in-residence a good one?
PG: It’s a very
good idea. There should be similar programs everywhere. The use
of workshopping pieces is very important, and I’d like to see much more of
it. But the composers shouldn’t be in the limelight, and the public
should not expect that they will produce masterpieces. They should be
able to go about their business, and learn and work with the theater, and
produce things and have them performed. But the expense of mounting
an opera behooves managements to look for only great works. With imagination,
an opera can be staged without breaking the company’s budget.
BD: Thank you
for working so hard on all of this material for us.
PG: I’m very
fortunate that I came along at a time when the performers are around who
take it seriously and perform it well, and when the publishing houses are
interested in these scores... and when Lee Freeman is willing to make it
financially feasible to do these editions.
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© 1988 Bruce Duffie
This conversation was recorded in Chicago on June 22, 1988.
Portions were broadcast on WNIB the following October, and again in 1996.
The transcription was made and published in The Opera Journal in September of 1991.
It was slightly re-edited and posted on this website in 2016.
To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed
and posted on this website,
click here. To
read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few
other interesting observations, click here.
* * * *
*
Award -
winning broadcaster Bruce
Duffie was with WNIB, Classical
97 in Chicago from 1975 until its
final moment as a classical station in February
of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in
various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now
continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as
well as on Contemporary
Classical Internet Radio.
You are invited to visit his website for more information
about his work, including selected transcripts
of other interviews, plus a full list of his
guests. He would also like to call your attention
to the photos and information about his grandfather,
who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago.
You may also send him E-Mail with comments,
questions and suggestions.