Henry Lee Higginson would be aghast at an opera company leaving its opera house. But it’s true. For murky reasons the reporting has not clarified, the Washington National Opera said it would leave the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after operating there since 1971.
Higginson was a Civil War brevet colonel who, after investment success, founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881. You could get into a performance for 25¢. By 1900 the orchestra had its own home, the Boston Symphony Hall. Higginson died in 1919, but the orchestra occupies that historic building to this day. When in the late ’60s and early ’70s, my friends bought Doors albums and experimented with marijuana, I attended the Wednesday night BSO open rehearsals to hear (and watch) Erich Leinsdorf and Seiji Ozawa ply their arts. I was thrilled when the conductor would stop and order a passage replayed, maybe with a little exasperated scold.
In latter years, my wife and I have had season tickets to the Washington opera. Few locals thought the Trump administration’s appetite for change would affect, of all things, the opera. But it has, like lightning zigzagging through a thicket of branches to nail a squirrel…