Welles at 100

Orson Welles, one of the supreme American artists of the twentieth century, would have been one hundred years old today. He never directed a full-blown opera production, despite numerous invitations to do so (his stagings of Copland's The Second Hurricane and Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock fall into a different category), but he did create what will forever stand as the greatest opera scene in film history: the disastrous première of Salammbô, with Susan Alexander Kane in the title role. (The delicious Massenet-ish aria that Bernard Herrmann composed for the occasion has become a concert item; on YouTube you can find performances by Eileen Farrell, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Venera Gimadieva. The text, by John Houseman, incorporates lines from Racine's Phèdre: "Ah! cruel, tu m'as trop entendue," etc.) Welles was an experienced operagoer, one who even had a bit of music criticism in his past: when he was thirteen, he wrote the "Hitting the High Notes" column for the Highland Park News, reviewing performances at the Ravinia Festival.

Previously: Welles in 1996.

More: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Catherine Benamou.