New Book On Opera Legends

The book is called, They Changed Opera, and here's part of a review from the New York Times Book Review. 

The collapse of the New York City Opera last month was many things, but it could hardly be called unexpected. Indeed, that the company had kept going for seventy years was more than a little amazing. Certainly the board of trustees made some terrible choices over the past decade—the most severe of them likely the decision to cancel a full season of performances at Lincoln Center in 2009 as its theater was renovated (New York City Ballet, which shared the space, made no such mistake) and then to leave the Center altogether in 2011.
But it had been a star-crossed organization for years, beset by strikes, warehouse fires, financial woes and the devastation of the early years of AIDS. Beverly Sills—the company’s biggest star, its long-time general manager and most effective fundraiser—estimated that the troupe lost more than 100 people to AIDS in the space of a decade: directors, conductors, singers, and others at the peak of their youth and sexual urgency, cut down by a mysterious new malady. The brilliant and venturesome Christopher Keene succeeded Sills as general director in 1989 and brought to the stage a number of daring modern operas, including Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. But he spent much of his tenure fighting the virus, sometimes all but incapacitated, before his early death in 1995.

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