January 2021
Vol. 4 No. 1
Zlatica Hoke: Editor-in-Chief
Rafael Prieto: Design
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
 
Dear readers,

I hope you all had pleasant holidays and are looking forward to a less turbulent year. The vaccine distribution, despite a sluggish start, gives us hope that our lives will return to normal some time this year.

Despite a relatively mild winter, many of us have been cooped up at home, relying on digital media for culture and entertainment. As a person who doesn’t even own a decent TV set, I surprised myself by turning to the Netflix and Amazon Prime for the first time in my life. I even watched series, which I avoid because I can never wait to see the end of a story, and if I am interrupted I lose interest.

And so, on some particularly dreary day in early January, I watched the current Netflix hit, Bridgerton, all of it in one go. My first reaction was probably common: “What? Black lords and ladies in the early 19th century?” But by the second or third episode I was so well entertained that the imporatnce of historical accuracy or a lack thereof paled. Among the black actors, I found Adjoa Andoh as Lady Danbury and Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte the most brilliant and the most entertaining.

In fact, after some thought, I realized that without the people of color, the series would be a washed out, sugary romance with zero substance. Further contemplation on the subject reminded me that the opera has been color blind a lot longer than the movie industry because the voice and quality of singing took precedence over the color of the skin. Since Marian Anderson, the first black singer to appear on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in January of 1955, many great singers of color made fame in the United States. While in the beginning we saw them mostly in the role of gypsies or exotic characters, today they can appear in any role that suits their voice and acting ability. And white tenors no longer need to blacken their face to sing Otello.

It also occurred to me that many years ago I saw a black Juliet at a Shakespeare festival in Britain and not so many years ago I saw a white Othello (none other than Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart) in Washington, partnered with a black Iago. Those performances of Shakespeare’s plays remained among the most memorable, along with an all-male performance of Romeo and Juliet by the Shakespeare Theater Company and an all-female production of another Shakespeare play by the Folger Theater.

The roster of the operatic premieres for 2021 and beyond suggests that we are likely to see more and more diversity in opera in the years to come. More new operas than ever have been written by women, African Americans and Asians.

Good music speaks to all of us, even inspires spiritual transformation, as related in this issue of the WOS Magazine by composer Jeremiah Ginsberg.

But first let’s look at the exciting list of WOS events that Executive Director Michael Reilly has in store for us in 2021.

Happy reading!

Zlatica Hoke
Planning for the 2021 Season
by Michael J. Reilly

After a long dry spell in the artistic desert, the Washington Opera Society, along with everyone else in the arts and business world, will venture out and begin the process of live productions in 2021. We consulted with our peers, our patrons and friends, and decided that September will be an excellent time for our first production. The Covid pandemic has created an introverted, neurotic society in Washington, and the entire world. Mask wearing is part of our daily routine when we leave our homes. It may be a part of our lives forever. We may decide that coming into contact with our fellow humans is no longer a safe, viable option. When will we want to attend another performance sitting closely to others? We think that even in the post-Covid world we will want to seat our patrons somewhat apart and encourage mask-wearing.

We are extremely proud to announce that Giuseppe Verdi’s great masterpiece Don Carlos will be our first production in almost one-and-a-half years. This production is not for the faint of heart, as it encompasses a large cast and chorus. This is serious opera for serious people, replete with heart-wrenching melodies, great solos which lift spirits, and choruses without compare. 
Verdi had originally written this opera in French at the behest of the Paris Opera. A later version appeared in Italian. We will produce the French version in the atrium of the French Embassy, or perhaps outdoors on the grounds of the ambassador’s residence, with a tent under the baton of our resident conductor, Maestro Julien Benichou. Either way, this production will be the highlight of the fall opera season in Washington, D.C. We will draw on our many contacts in the artistic world for great singers, worthy of this opera.

It has been our custom to produce an operetta for our holiday seasons in the last three years. Our patrons may remember our Washington premiere productions of Emmerich Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin at the Embassy of Uzbekistan in 2018, followed by another premiere of Lehár’s spirited operetta Das Land des Lächelns in 2019. Last year, despite the pandemic we didn’t want to disappoint our loyal patrons with no program at all, so we produced an online video recap of Kálmán’s Countess Maritza. We now feel that we couldn’t do this lovely operetta justice by a 30-minute recording. So we will produce Maritza in November with full orchestra, chorus, and cast. You can see a snippet of the great music on our YouTube channel, (click here to view) which we hope will titillate your senses.
For the fans of our annual Garden Party: please don’t distress. We will again be hosting a lovely outdoor evening at the home of Executive Director Michael Reilly. Patrons will remember the good food, live dancing, and great merriment enjoyed by those who attended. This year our theme will be An Evening in Monte Carlo. Sorry to say that there won’t be gambling. However, you may spot a few titled individuals, or even a few spies about, and the air is always full of intrigue and excitement. It’s not to be missed!  

Our patrons know our commitment to the youth and how important it is to pass along our great cultural heritage with regard to the opera and classical music. Popular culture is all-encompassing everywhere not only in the United States, but around the free world. In Mozart’s day, opera was popular culture. Unfortunately, opera is not on the radar screens of young people. As part of a classical education, we believe that presenting the majesty of the opera to our young people is an obligation, one which the school systems do not perpetuate. The Washington Opera Society takes seriously this obligation and we have committed resources for our Youth Initiative. Starting in September we will be presenting free narrated master classes and concerts at local high schools and universities in Washington, DC.  
Minorities Feature Prominently in Upcoming New Operas
By Zlatica Hoke

Contemporary operas can be an ordeal to sit through. Composers are pressured to offer some new and groundbreaking concept, which usually means hard-to-like music, black-and-white scenography, and absolute absence of tradition. Melody is anathema. A few years ago, I came to Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking at the Washington National Opera almost directly from the world premiere of La Ciudad de las Mentiras (City of Lies) in Madrid. While Heggie’s opera leaned toward traditional, Elena Mendoza’s opus at Teatro Real in Spain’s capital, bore all the characteristics of a modern work.
La Ciudad de las Mentiras, Teatro Real, Madrid, 2017, photo: Z. Hoke

Mendoza used four stories by Juan Carlos Onetti to explore theatrical and perhaps some musical possibilities, but her sopranos, tenors and baritones never sang. They recited lines from the stories so intertwined that only those familiar with Onetti's work could hope to understand what was going on. The English language surtitles kept the uninitiated out of a complete fog, and a written introduction gave some clarification, but I had to agree with a co-spectator who argued that if a work of art needs so much explanation, it is not a good work of art. If Mendoza's singers did not sing, neither did the musicians play much music. At one point a man appeared on the stage with an accordion only to tap his hand on it a couple of times. An actor portraying a bartender scratched a metal tray with a knife, a piano player hit the keyboard a couple of times and the orchestra produced some "atmospheric" sound, sort of like a distant wind howling. Overall, it was an interesting, innovative stage production, but it was not what an average person would call an opera.

That word typically conjures images of Figaro, Carmen or Violetta singing their hearts out in melodies most opera lovers can hum in the shower. We usually think of opera as a dramatic or comic story related through song and instrumental music. It consists of melodic arias that express a character’s feelings, and spoken or almost spoken recitativi, which move the action forward. Of course, today, if you google the word “opera”, you may come across information about a browser for Android devices.

Many modern operas veer away from the standard structure. In September of last year, the historic Bavarian State opera in Munich, Germany, premiered a new music-theater work, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, by controversial performance icon Marina Abramović. The New York-based artist is perhaps best known for her 2010 MoMA performance The Artists Is Present, in which she sat at a table speechless while long lines of visitors waited to sit across her and watch her facial expressions.

For a classical opera fan, the one-hour performance was an outrage as was Abramovic’s claim that she and Callas have a lot in common. But perhaps more importantly, Abramović’s latest opus was an homage to a great soprano that some performance art fans may never have heard of. Similarly, the television series Lovecraft Country features an episode based on the 1921 Tulsa massacre that is accompanied by operatic music at the request of composer Laura Karpman. The soundtrack ends in a requiem.

Belgian composer Jean-Luc Fafchamps opened the 2020 season at the La Monnaie opera house in Brussels with a “pop requiem” Is This the End? Éric Brucher's libretto focuses on a woman caught in a twilight zone between life and death. There, she meets other people in a kind of transitional state between this world and the next. The staging by Ingrid von Wantoch Rekowski contrasts the live action on stage with film sequences shot inside the theatre and then integrated into the live performance. But the piece is conceived for watching from home.

Fans of the traditional music theater may wonder why we even call some of these modern pieces of theater “opera.” But we should be reminded that in Italian, opera means work, labor or opus. Operaio is a worker or laborer. So the word opera is not restricted to the kind of music performances with which it is most often associated.

The new works we sometimes dismiss too quickly actually bode well for the future of the opera. Their creators acknowledge and often build on the timeless masterpieces and pay homage to old masters.
Let’s look at some of the novelties in the pipeline for the upcoming opera seasons.

In the United States, hopes are high that the Metropolitan Opera will be able to re-open on September 27 and make history by staging its first ever opera created by an African American composer and an African American librettist. Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, is based on the memoir by Charles M. Blow and will star Angel Blue, Latonia Moore, and Will Liverman.

The Met will premiere two other operas in its new season: Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, starring Erin Morley in the title role, and Brett Dean’s Hamlet, with Allan Clayton portraying the tortured Danish prince.

Cincinnati Opera’s ambitious plan for the next season includes two world premieres: Fierce by William Menefield and Castor and Patience by Gregory Spears. Fierce focuses on four teenage girls who struggle to adjust to school, family, and friendship, and follows their journeys toward empowerment. In their college essays, one mourns the loss of a special friend. Another one hides behind her popularity. The third feels oppressed by her parents’ expectations. And the last one struggles with a troubled home life. Despite the chorus of trolls that taunts them, the girls unite in their fight against adversity. The libretto is inspired by life stories of real Cincinnati-area teenage girls.

Castor and Patience is centered on two cousins from an African American family who find themselves at odds over the fate of a historic parcel of land they have inherited in the American South. The opera probes historical obstacles to black land ownership in the United States.

Spoleto Festival USA has commissioned a new opera by Grammy Award-Winner Rhiannon Giddens, inspired by a real-life character from the American South. Titled Omar, the opera is based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said – an enslaved African man from the Futa Toro region of present-day Senegal - who was brought to Charleston in 1807. Thirteen years later, Omar, a Muslim, converted to Christianity, but his manuscripts written in Arabic, especially his autobiographical essay, suggest that he remained faithful to Islam. 

Dayton Opera will present its first ever full-length opera premiere in its coming season. Finding Wright is a result of creative collaboration of four talented women: composer Laura Kaminsky, librettist Andrea Fellows Fineberg, conductor Susanne Sheston and stage director Kathleen Clawson. In Finding Wright, 21st century Charlotte (Charlie) Tyler, a young, recently widowed, aerospace engineer and researcher learns about the extraordinary life of Katharine Wright, younger sister of flight pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The Wrights siblings were born in Dayton, Ohio.

The Washington National Opera is planning to continue its new opera initiative as soon as the circumstances allow with a short work intended for all ages, titled Elephant & Piggie, based on the book I Really Like Slop! The music is by D.C.-based composer and 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence winner Carlos Simon. The libretto is by author and illustrator Mo Willems, who is the Kennedy Center’s first education artist-in-residence. 

Looking beyond 2021, we can expect to see an opera adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours. The film adaptation featured Hollywood stars Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman. Co-commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the opera by composer Kevin Puts will bring back star soprano Renee Fleming from her semi-retirement. Puts, whose opera Silent Night won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, is collaborating on The Hours with librettist Greg Pierce. The staged premiere, also featuring Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara is slated for 2022.

San Francisco Opera is likely to bring in a performance of the new Finnish opera Innocence in the near future. The work by composer Kaija Saariaho and novelist Sofi Oksanen, is a co-production of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Finnish National Opera, the Royal Opera House in London, the Dutch National Opera, and the San Francisco Opera, and is sung in nine languages: English, Finnish, Czech, Romanian, French, Swedish, German, Spanish and Greek.

Here is how Music Finland online describes the opera: “Innocence takes place at a wedding in present-day Helsinki, Finland, with an international guest list. The groom is Finnish, the bride is Romanian, and the mother-in-law is French. But the groom’s family has a dark secret – ten years earlier, these characters were involved in a tragic event. When the events from long ago begin to unravel and the ghosts of the past revive their memories of the trauma, the family faces the question: where does the innocence end and guilt begins?

Sounds bergmanesque and intriguing.

Los Angeles Opera’s new season is highlighting a one-man opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun. In the work titled In Our Daughter’s Eyes, baritone Nathan Gunn portrays a father struggling to become a man his daughter would be proud of. As a gift for his unborn daughter, he writes a diary documenting his journey to fatherhood.  

More new operas than ever are written by and about minorities. Just a few years ago the best that a female or African American composer could hope for was a performance at a smaller local theater. Now, the world’s most eminent opera houses are fighting to commission their best efforts and turn the spotlight on them. If successful, these works may change the world of opera in unexpected ways. 
Introducing My New American Music
By Jeremiah Ginsberg

“What do you want?” asked Michael Reilly, executive director of The Washington Opera Society, as we sat at dinner celebrating my 85th Birthday on October 16, 2020. Wow! What a broad question! What do I want? In my life? Before I die? For dessert? How do I answer such a wide-ranging question? I don’t often talk about my private life or the deepest desires of my heart, but the words began to flow, and I held nothing back. So, here’s my reply, my story, the purpose of all the musicals I write, “the new American music” which I have been writing for more than 50 years.

To give you a little background, I was born in New Haven, CT, into a loving, musical, Russian Jewish family. My father was an accomplished musician, an original member of the Artie Shaw Band who also played the string bass in the New Haven Symphony. My uncles were musicians and composers, one of them a graduate of Yale School of Music. I’m a classically trained bassist who performed in jazz groups throughout high school and college, and was even asked if I would like to join the Sarah Vaughan Trio.

However, my dad didn’t want me to be a musician, so I went to New York Law School and became an attorney, passing the Bar and practicing in both New York and Connecticut. But I never gave up my love of music. During law school, I began collaborating on musicals for the Broadway stage.

Then in 1972, something happened that changed the course of my life and influenced my music. During a prayer, a wondrous vision of heaven opened before me and I saw unquestionably that Yeshua (Jesus) truly is the promised Jewish Messiah. The Yeshua I saw was not the blond-haired, blue-eyed Catholic that I had always envisioned, but a Jew like me. Are you familiar with Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Yeshua looks a lot like God in that fresco painting, but younger and with auburn hair instead of white.

I yearned to tell my Jewish people of my discovery, but what would be the best way to share the story? The answer: write a gospel musical with Jewish flavor!

I also needed to tell my fellow Jews about the war fought in heaven between God and Satan, Good versus Evil, and how the Jews have been maligned since they became a people by that vicious enemy of God, Satan, who despised them just because they were the “chosen” of God. Satan’s hatred was the real reason for anti-Semitism that culminated in Hitler and the Holocaust, but how many of us were aware of it?

I earnestly desired to share the truth I had discovered about Satan’s brutal jealousy of Jews for being the “Apple of God’s Eye” and about the resultant heartbreak of their own Jewish Messiah, whom they did not recognize and who had died to rescue them and give them and all mankind salvation. I felt that Jews needed to understand why they were so hated by so many people and nations throughout the ages and I also wanted to reveal to the Jew-haters of the world just who was behind their evil thoughts. Like God gives thoughts, so too does Satan. I just had to expose the dark mysteries of the true malignant identity of Satan, the master of disguise, who actually exists but fights to hide it. He is the unseen author and manipulator of the ancient demonic attempt to destroy the Jewish people, their Great God, and anyone who would dare defend them.

Following my life-changing epiphany, a serendipitous occurrence brought me to Calvin Marsh, a leading baritone with The Metropolitan Opera, who had sung more than 900 performances with such greats as Maria Callas before retiring to enter Christian ministry. Upon hearing a few of my Hebraic Biblical songs, he insisted that I would become his accompanist and he would sing my songs. Me accompany an opera star on the piano? I was not an accomplished pianist, but a bass player who only played enough piano to write my music, and that was it! But he was sure that it was “beshert” (Yiddish for “meant to be”) and I accepted the idea that it was God’s divine arrangement for my life.

So I accompanied this great baritone in concerts of my music in churches throughout America, then in Jerusalem, Jordan and Damascus, Syria. Subsequently, Calvin and I recorded 28 of my compositions, which are stashed in my computer to this very day. He greatly encouraged me one night by singing several of my songs at a Newark concert hall as a warm-up performance for the Jerome Hines opera, I Am the Way, in which he performed the lead role of Simon Peter. He introduced me to a packed hall as “the next Irving Berlin of the Broadway Theater.” Wow, what a compliment! That was my friend, Calvin Marsh.

Constantly feeling an uncomfortable nagging inside of me to write about the Jewish Messiah I had seen in heaven, I got down to work. I started to write Rabboni (Hebrew for “my master” or “my teacher”), a gospel musical with a Fiddler on The Roof flavor. But I needed to come up with an interesting slant and could not do so no matter how hard I wracked my brain. Then one morning, as I was shaving, the word “weasel” came into my consciousness. What? Weasel? After much consternation, I eventually figured out that my prayer for a concept for my musical was being answered. Not only was weasel a small furry predatory animal but it was also a cunning, sneaky, mocking, untrustworthy person, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It occurred to me that Beelzebub, the biblical prince of demons, got his name from an ancient word for ”lord of the flies.”

So I sat down and created a manic depressive, bi-polar, hyper-inflammatory, mood-alternating psychotic-type character that I imagined the Devil to be, for a work titled The Weasel Beelzebub. I kept the title until I cast the show at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, CA, and then changed it to Rabboni for productions in churches in the Los Angeles area where we ultimately won a Bronze Halo Award from the Southern California Motion Picture Council for “Excellence in Family Entertainment.”

In 1985, Wendy, my darling wife, and I were sent from L.A. to NYC, and after struggling to raise the budget, we produced Rabboni at the Perry Street Theatre, off-off-Broadway, where it ran for the entire summer to great reviews. I was more amazed at the success than anyone else. I expected rotten tomatoes and instead received roses! You can read some of those reviews on our Jeremiah Theatricals website (jeremiahtheatricals.org) of that and other musicals we have written and produced. Wendy and I co-write the scripts, and I write the music, lyrics, and orchestrations. Rabboni was followed by Mendel & Moses, then The Time of Mendel’s Trouble, and our operetta, Esther, Sweet Esther, which premiered in Washington, D.C. Our fifth musical is a work-in-progress titled The Three Days of Elijah.

I always loved the great classics! My father often brought me to Yale’s Woolsey Hall where he played in the New Haven Symphony. He also opened many Broadway shows in the orchestra of the Shubert Theatre where I was fortunate enough to attend many pre-Broadway dress rehearsals. Even years earlier, when I was a small boy, my grandfather would sit and listen to his pile of scratchy RCA-78-rpm Enrico Caruso masterpieces, with me sitting at his feet, watching and listening to this glorious operatic music.
My career in music has been gradual. When we were presenting our production of Mendel & Moses, the story of the Children of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, at the Royalty Theatre in Clearwater, FL, Giorgio Aristo, the great European operatic tenor, was playing the role of Pharaoh and his wife, Melody Kielisch, a prominent European soprano, was attending one of the performances. Afterwards, she came up to me and said, “You are a modern-day Puccini. Your melodies are so beautiful! You should write an opera.” “I am a theater writer and would not know where to start. But if I tried, what would I write?” Melody replied, “My favorite Bible story is Esther.”

So I took a shot and wrote the first aria, “If I Perish, I Will Perish,” called Melody and played and sang it for her over the phone. She liked it and encouraged me to keep writing, but I got busy with another project and put it aside. After a time, I remembered that Wendy had once written a play for our temple, which induced much joy and hilarious laughter. We dug through old files and were finally able to locate the script in an old computer from about 12 years earlier and I started to work on it, composing what would become our first operetta, Esther, Sweet Esther.
We were invited in 2013 to perform two arias from the Esther project with four of our outstanding performers at the Presidential Inaugural Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC. and received standing ovation. Wendy and I finished the operetta, and aided by our distinguished publicist, Jan Du Plain, presented a full concert version in 2017, again to standing ovation, at the National Press Club in DC. Here’s a link to our Esther, Sweet Esther website, which will give you many of the details and theatricals reviews. (esthersweetesther.com)
Above, from left to right: Candy Carson, Dr. Ben Carson, Wendy Ginsberg & Jeremiah Ginsberg
Now, back to that dinner table where Michael Reilly, along with two members of his Board of Directors, Alexandra N. Sényi and Rafael Prieto, and Jan Du Plain, Wendy and myself were discussing how we could collaborate in the Washington Opera Society’s new Youth Initiative. What would be the plan? After all, they had their goals and we had ours. Where would the twain meet? This was our first chance to sit down together. We had been talking by email and on the phone but Covid-19 had kept us apart.

After sharing with Michael and his team about how we dramatized the conflict between Yeshua and Beelzebub, Good versus Evil, often comedically in our musical, Rabboni, now titled Messiah, Wendy and I excused ourselves from the table for a few minutes. While we were away, Michael’s team came up with the brilliant idea that our Youth Initiative collaboration should include themes of salvation and redemption not unlike Goethe’s Faust.

Anonymous Germanic stories written in the 1500s, upon which the Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe predicated his Dr. Faustus and Goethe his masterpiece almost 200 years later. Charles Gounod’s Faust, Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele and even Broadway in the musical, Damn Yankees, all feature devil’s efforts to attract people to sin.

My collaborative effort with the Washington Opera Society is based on the classical Faustian theme, but includes comical elements. Michael and I will pose and answer the perpetual question: “Why has God allowed this rebellion of Darkness against Light, Chaos against Order, the Devil’s lies against God’s truth?” I won’t give out our answer here. You’ll just have to come and see our presentations to get it. 

No one knows for sure when the current Covid pestilence will allow us to make this presentation. But I welcome the opportunity whenever it comes to bring God’s healing to people through my music, which highlights the themes of salvation and redemption through overcoming trials.
Comings & Goings in 2020…
by Michael J. Reilly

In a General End-of-Year Board Meeting among Members of the Washington Opera Society on Dec. 11th, the Membership voted unanimously for Vienna-born Alexandra Sényi de Nagy-Unyom as our 2021 Board President. Ms. Sényi brings a wealth of experience to this position, and will endeavor to lead the Washington Opera Society into the post-covid era. Ms. Sényi is an attorney in private practice, focusing on international law, immigration, and family law. 

A native of Vienna, Austria and an avid traveler, she has lived in various countries. Among her international experience, she has clerked for the solicitor’s office of the Department of Trade and Commerce in the Czech Republic and has served as an Austrian diplomatic representative in Japan. Ms. Sényi holds a B.A. in International Law and Political Science from the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas and she was a Socrates-Erasmus scholarship recipient at the Charles University of Prague.
In addition to her J.D. from the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas, she completed her MA. at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and her L.L.M at Georgetown Law. Believing in the spirit of community service and philanthropy, Ms. Sényi has been highly involved with the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, as an Executive member, and Benefit Committee Co-Chair of its annual Gala. In addition, Ms. Sényi is proud to serve on the Executive Board of FAIR Girls, an organization that fights human trafficking in the DMV area. In her free time, Ms. Sényi enjoys reading biographies, traveling to exotic destinations, and she is passionate about classical music, especially opera. As a lover of music, she has been a long-time supporter of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The Company is also proud to announce that Mr. Cary Pollak has been re-elected as Vice President of the Board of Directors for 2021. Cary served in that capacity from 2016-2018 and continued as a member of the Board thereafter. He retired from the position of Senior Assistant Attorney General for the District of Columbia some years ago and still remains active in his profession. He is a member of the faculty of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, helping to teach litigation skills courses to lawyers around the country and is a member of the William Bryant Inn of Court at the federal courthouse in the District of Columbia. In addition to his love of the opera, Cary is a well-known food and travel writer and cooking instructor. He has been featured in print media and on radio talk shows across the country. Locally, his byline has appeared in Capitol File and DC Style magazines and in The Wire, which is the on line news publication of the National Press Club, where Cary serves on the House Committee.
In other news, The Washington Opera Society mourns with our country and the world the passing of Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg last year. Justice Ginsberg is naturally remembered for her keen judicial expertise and landmark rulings, affecting millions of people in the United States. Also well-known for her love of the opera, one would not only see the justice at the Kennedy Center and other performance arts venues, enjoying the opera as a patron and spectator, but also on stage as a “spear carrier”, the term devoted to non-singing appearances of well-known personalities. She shared her love of the opera with her deceased colleague, Justice Antonin Scalia, who also made periodic appearances as a “spear carrier” at the Washington National Opera. We remember Justice Ginsberg in a letter she wrote to us in 2018.
We look forward to greeting each one of you soon in person.
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