Heidi Waleson | Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America

• Books & Literature
• Free
• Performing Arts

Join Book Culture on Columbus on Wednesday, October 10th, at 7pm in celebrating the release of Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America. The author, Heidi Waleson, will be interviewed by Zachary Woolfe, classical music editor of The New York Times.

From the Wall Street Journal‘s opera critic, a wide-ranging narrative history of how and why the New York City Opera went bankrupt—and what it means for the future of the arts

In October 2013, the arts world was rocked by the news that the New York City Opera—“the people’s opera”—had finally succumbed to financial hardship after 70 years in operation. The company had been a fixture on the national opera scene—as the populist antithesis of the grand Metropolitan Opera, a nurturing home for young American talent, and a place where new, lively ideas shook up a venerable art form. But NYCO’s demise represented more than the loss of a cherished organization: it was a harbinger of massive upheaval in the performing arts—and a warning about how cultural institutions would need to change in order to survive.

Heidi Waleson has been the opera critic of the Wall Street Journal for 25 years. In addition to her regular criticism, her work has also focused more broadly on the changing profiles of musical institutions, new models for opera presentation, and the broader significance of opera and culture. She is a faculty member of the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Zachary Woolfe is the classical music editor of The New York Times. He was previously the opera critic of the New York Observer, a writer and editor at Capital New York, and an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.