The second most eagerly anticipated operatic event of 1999—the first being John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby, which opened at the Met in December—took place October 28 in Chicago when the Lyric Opera presented the premiere of William Bolcom’s A View From the Bridge. Interest in the new opera, based upon Arthur Miller’s 1955 play, was stoked by lavish pre-publicity, including a series in The New York Times which chronicled the development of the work from composition to dress rehearsal to opening night.

Miller’s drama concerns the longshoreman Eddie Carbone from Brooklyn, and his complex relationship with his adopted niece, Catherine. When Eddie agrees to take two Sicilian cousins of his wife Beatrice into their household, the darkly conflicted side of his overprotective attitude toward the seventeen-year-old Catherine is unveiled. Her growing affection for the blond cousin Rodolpho arouses Eddie’ ...

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