In a widely circulated recording of that fateful 1975 performance, an insistent cough echoes out from the audience. It hacks. It hawks. It sniffles and snorts, gasping forward, defying suppression. Its impudence demanded justice. And so a knight stepped forward.

As a multifaceted synthesis of music, theater, visual art, stagecraft, and boundless creative inspiration, opera is by its very nature a deeply collaborative art form. The magic on stage and in the pit would not be possible without the community of individuals on both sides of the curtain who care deeply for the art and work together to make it a reality.

As the world reemerges from silence, we are finding opera as though for the first time. The crashing chords that open Tosca filled us with dread and foreboding as though we’d never heard them before.