“Opera is the coming together of music, theatre, design, people and coughing in the greatest synthesis of art capable of collapsing at the beep of a watch alarm. … As the sounds soar and mingle perfectly, the evening makes sense, the stupidity is forgotten and the burglars and the rain and the hundred cars outside and the fight 40 yards across the street, and then someone sneezes, which is when, somewhere in the middle of the second act, in a radical switch to the American midwest, we return to a stage full of big people and papier-mâché cacti.”