The Impossible Art

A user's guide to opera—Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" ( The New York Times Magazine ), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice , and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of opera From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the