Elliott Carter was 90 when he wrote his first opera. Some consider Carter America’s greatest living composer. Others “a mandarin aesthetic whose target audience can only be the academic analyst armed with graph paper and a calculator.” An the opera? “It boasts his perennial avoidance – as if on principle – of any hint of beauty, expressive content or sensual delight. It remains as resolutely standoffish toward the listener’s merely human sensibilities as a lump of granite.” – San Francisco Chronicle