<<<  <<  -- 4 --  Robert Anderson    POLITICAL CONTROVERSY

We have seen repetiteurs at work, make-up artists applying powders and colours, hairdressers recovering styles of a hundred and twenty-five years back, a youthful orchestra displaying uncanny skill. And at last an audience, motley if hardly equipped for Glyndebourne, is ushered into the theatre and we see part of the finished production [watch and listen -- chapter 13, 38:01-39:44]. This can only whet the appetite for an opera that deals with Washington corruption during the presidency of Ulysses S Grant, distinguished soldier of the Civil War, but administrator soon out of his depth and weathervane only too subject to opposing blasts from the factions of Congress.