Telling fortunes.(Viewpoint)

On October 29, the Metropolitan Opera announced the appointment of a new general manager, Peter Gelb, who will succeed outgoing general manager Joseph Volpe in 2006. Undoubtedly, Gelb's professional experience as a manager and recording-company executive will redefine the position of general manager at the Met in his time there, just as the acuity and strength of purpose acquired from long years of in-house service defined the era of his predecessor. The first blessing of the Gelb appointment is that it ended months of speculation about just who would follow Volpe in one of the biggest jobs in the classical-music world--a fevered guessing game that had grown increasingly outlandish.

Crystal-ball gazing is almost never a good idea, especially in the high-risk (and high-casualty) world of opera. Occasionally, though, a shot at predicting the future hits a bull's-eye, as in the OPERA NEWS article of October 5, 1942, "Gay Music for a Grim Time," an interview with veteran stage director Herbert Graf. Fresh from directing The Merry Wives of Windsor at Tanglewood, Graf noted, "A real find of the season was Mario Lanza, a Philadelphia tenor who made a great success as Fenton." Lanza, just twenty-one when he sang that Fenton, was indeed a real find, although it took the rest of the world a few years to catch up with Graf's assessment of him--and the singular course of Lanza's eventual celebrity, a product of Hollywood rather than the opera house, was surely far beyond the wildest imaginings of even so astute a pro as Graf.

Not all opera-watchers ...