Sean McFate: “For a man in my profession, there’s much to love. Like war, things usually go horribly wrong in opera. For instance, take Verdi’s La forza del destino.” But it’s more than that: “Opera is my lodestone in the darkness. Its beauty offsets war’s ugliness, and without such balance, we slip into numbness and eventual insanity, robbed of our humanity.” — Quartz