Lotfi's Latest

So, Lotfi Mansouri, former general manager of the San Francisco Opera, published a memoir recently, called An Operatic Journey. A friend circulated a bunch of juicy quotations, once of which made me seriously wonder about the book:

I took him to lunch and told him he should be proud to be music director of a house with excellent conductors, like Gergiev, Donhnanyi, Schneider, Santi, and Pappano. But he wasn't. He was jealous, especially of anyone he suspected might be better than he was. He showed absolutely no intellectual ambition. Other conductors are voracious readers, but I never saw Donald pick up a book. When I worked with him on an incredibly profound piece, such as 'Death in Venice,' we couldn't discuss the deeper aspects.

What I replied at the time: "So Donald's Wagner would be better if he read Nietzsche?"

Then La Cieca noticed an outright and significant error of fact; see the Parterre Box posting That is what fiction means

Today, Opera West publishes comments about Mansouri by former SFO Managing Director Michael Savage. His description of Mansouri sounds an awful lot like Mansouri's description of Runnicles. This is similar to the Republican name-calling tactics: if you watch and listen closely, you find that the Republicans are doing whatever they claim the Democrats are doing. (Running up deficits, for example.)

Oh - and it turns out Runnicles does read.