
Taki's Top Drawer
Stalin is Dead; Long Live Don Giovanni!
It was 1890, and the opera was Lucia di Lamermoor. The Donizetti masterpiece was conducted by a Bulgarian maestro and the opera house–recently opened–was filled by Greek society in the good seats, and by poor people, who had never heard an opera in their lives, who were more or less bribed off the street by fancy types to act as a rapt audience. Everything went fine, for a while….