OPERA HAS ALWAYS BEEN THEATER

Robert Edmund Jones was a great set designer and dramatic theorist who designed for the opera as well as Broadway. His 1941 The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre has many lines worth quoting.  Jones had been going to the theater for decades, and it was his view, citing specifically Emma Calve and Fyodor Chaliapin, “some of the best actors in the world are to be found on the operatic stage.”