“John Crosby, who died Dec. 15 at age 76, after a brief illness, was one of the great visionaries of American opera. Back in the 1950s he imagined a summer opera festival in what struck plenty of people as the very last place on Earth. He borrowed money from his father, a New York lawyer, to buy a 76-acre ranch on a hilltop just north of Santa Fe, N.M. And in July 1957, in a primitive hillside amphitheater, he inaugurated Santa Fe Opera by conducting ‘Madama Butterfly’.”