SEPTEMBER SONG.

My September anthem was always a three-word threnody: "Back to School." My last brush with an institution of even moderate learning was in 1968, but for nearly three decades the final days of August brought with them a feeling of disquiet that matured into bona fide anxiety when Labor Day came and went. Then OPERA NEWS introduced "Hot Tickets," and September became a month to celebrate. This year, Rebecca Paller has assembled a notable lineup (p. 30) of coming attractions from opera companies across the U.S. Who would want to miss Ben Heppner's first go at a staged Otello, at Lyric Opera of Chicago, partnered by Renee Fleming? The Dallas world premiere of Tobias Picker's Therese Raquin will certainly be another hard-to-get-into event; for background on it, read "Dark Waters" by OPERA NEWS associate editor William V. Madison, which begins on page 46. If I were free to roam, my season might begin in Los Angeles, where Kent Nagano and Maximilian Schell collaborate on a new Lohengrin this month, and finish next spring in Saint Louis with Loss of Eden, a new opera about Charles Lindbergh.

I would bet that the hottest ticket at the Met this season will be the company premiere of Prokofiev's War and Peace, with a dream cast and the electric Valery Gergiev conducting. That opening night isn't until Valentine's Day, in mid-February. While waiting, voice aficionados will want to see the Met's new production of Norma, opening in November, which will unite the titanic voices of Jane Eaglen and Dolora Zajick and promises to be, well, awesome.

Particularly fascinating will be the reworking of Franco Zeffirelli's production of Falstaff, which was justly famed for elegance and subtlety. As Zeffirelli himself has shown with his various stagings of La Traviata, reassessment of a familiar work can be a stimulating challenge. But recapturing at age seventy-nine the atmosphere and feel of something he produced at age forty-one has to be difficult, especially within the framework of a production widely regarded as nearly ...