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The landscape of American opera is littered with the corpses of noble, well-intentioned failures: born in hope, prepared with loving care and christened with a flourish, only to be received with scorn, then banished to an operatic twilight zone, never to be seen or heard again. For more than two decades Dominick Argento's Miss Havisham's Fire belonged to this category. A distillation of Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations, Havisham was first produced by New York City Opera for a brief (four-performance) run in the spring of 1979, when it received mixed press notices. Bits of the score were recycled by the composer in the intervening years; the blacksmith's tune ...