20th Century Opera’s Most Misunderstood Flop?

It was one of the highest-profile world premieres in opera history: Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, commissioned for the 1966 grand opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center. The audience cheered, but critics sneered or sniffed. “Was the world deaf? Music once perceived as 50 years behind the times now seems to have been written 40 years too early. Same notes, opposite impressions.”

Why Edward Hopper Is Confusing

Despite being in Europe in the 1920s, as the great revolutions in modern art were happening, “[his] mind was not blown by Cubism. He did not succumb to the excitement of any avant-garde. … Was he an ugly American, so wedded to simplistic imagery that the finer points of Cubism or abstract painting would have been over his head? Did Hopper rely on cliché because that was all he understood?”