“Who has an opera made of their life? Roman gods, doomed lovers, Nixon, and now, to our great surprise, my wife Jessie and I. … In popular usage, the words ‘operatic’ and ‘tragic’ are roughly synonymous, the required minimum bet of misery much greater for opera than memoir. So how should you take it if professionals think your life was awful enough to qualify? The war was bad, I admit, but I didn’t know my war was Wagner bad.”