Passing the baton. (Viewpoint).

This is the first issue of OPERA NEWS that covers the Met's 2001-02 broadcast season. It is also the first issue in which the new name of the broadcasts' long-time sponsor appears: the ChevronTexaco--Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network. Hopes are high that the merger of two powerhouses will produce an enterprise that will show the same kind of steadfastness and imagination that Texaco demonstrated in its six decades of commitment. Deployment of such assets on the larger scale made possible by the combination of these two companies could do wonders for our national culture, not to mention for opera. Not so many years ago, America's corporations were known by the company they kept on radio and television; season after season there would be a Kraft Playhouse or a Voice of Firestone, and those pairings suggested high standards. The Texaco-Met match is just about the only one that has survived marketers questing for the next mass enthusiasm and quailing lest they be charged with elitism. My hope is that ChevronTexaco, bigger and stronger than its component parts, will see in the expanding audience for opera a challenge to make the art form what it used to be, a truly popular entertainment that embraced new work, treasured old masterpieces and performed both with the highest possible standards and an informed respect for tradition. That is a mission worthy of sponsorship by ChevronTexaco, a splendid new company that we welcome to the pages of OPERA NEWS.

Perhaps an enlightened corporation will make the cultural life of the country a priority in response to "Diminuendo," by Brooks Peters, which begins on page 36. In part a threnody for a vanished conviction that music education must be an integral part of all curriculums, the article is also a survey of bold attempts in such places as Birmingham, Alabama, and New York City to restore arts funding, even while elsewhere tax trimmers cut it as a frippery. In many parts of the country, sentiment is only just beginning to turn in favor of restoring arts education at the expense of tax ...