At the beginning of January I was invited to take part in a panel discussion at the annual meeting of Opera America, the advocacy and service association of opera companies, large and small, in the United States and Canada. This meeting, a several-day affair, was to be held at the end of that same month in Washington, D.C., scarcely a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the National Endowment for the Arts, the center of so much public controversy in recent months over the proprieties of federal arts funding.

Both because of the present climate for public support and because of wider trends in opera today, the panel to which I was invited promised to be particularly interesting. On it there was to appear the controversial stage director Peter Sellars, much noticed in the more progressive precincts of the opera world for his production of John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987), and for his audacious updatings of Mozart operas at the Pepsico Summerfare festival at the State University of New York at Purchase, as well as a similar treatment of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Chicago Lyric Opera a season ago. There were to be three other members of the panel: Christopher Hunt, the guiding genius of Pepsico Summerfare from 1984 until its dissolution last year; the black composer Anthony Davis, whose opera X, a setting of the life of Malcolm X, was much talked about on its production in the 1986 season at the