“We are told all the time that the audience’s expectations for opera have changed because our society is visually oriented, educated by films and television, even by opera on television. We now expect opera to be theatrically vital. One problem with this view is that our visual society has not been well educated by films and television — media that even now often ignore the “visual” reality of the society they are supposed to reflect. People come in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and types of behavior; they engage in passionate love affairs and die nobly or ignobly, regardless of their outward appearance. In a way, opera is a more honest art form than the movies, because people look the way they do rather than the way film fans expect heroes and villains to appear.”