Opening Night

Three first nights. Three cities. One man with everything on the line.

An hour before the doors open, the music is the least of anyone's worries. The paint may not be dry. A singer is nursing a grievance. The candles are already burning down. And a great deal of money rests on nothing more solid than the willingness of a few hundred strangers to be moved by sounds that have never been heard in this order before.

Three times in five years, a small, quick, restless man walked into a theatre that was not entirely ready and conducted into the world an opera that had not entirely been heard. The Marriage of Figaro, smuggled past the censors in a banned play's costume, triumphs so violently the Emperor must outlaw the encores. Don Giovanni, racing an unfinished overture, opens in a Prague that cheers its author three times before a single note sounds. The Magic Flute, conducted by a dying man in a wooden suburban theatre, nearly fails in its first act before rising to become the most beloved opera of its age.

Told as cinematic, hour-by-hour narrative, Opening Night puts you in the candlelit house as the curtain rises: the cabals and the copyists, the showman in the feathered suit, the legends that grew up around these evenings and the stranger truths underneath them. Where the famous stories are myth, this book says so. Where the documented facts are more astonishing than the legend, it lets them land.

A showman's history of three nights that could have gone wrong, and the genius who bet everything they would not.