“WHAT HAPPENED IS.” THIS LINE FROM the new opera Castor and Patience is bouncing around my head as I leave Cincinnati. It rings mysterious and true like tourism copy written by a poet. History hits you in the face everywhere, sure, but there are places that hit you harder. I’m used to tripping over fragments of a 1960s future-that-almost-was in Montreal, and Cincinnati feels haunted by 19th-century success in the same way.
Take the Music Hall, the Victorian Gothic home of Cincinnati Opera where the premiere did not take place (the room’s too big). This handsomely imposing building opened in 1878, a child of the industrial and agricultural expositions held in Cincinnati since the 1830s and a marker of the city’s healthy competition with Chicago and St Louis to connect western raw materials and eastern manufacturing. The Music Hall was improved in 1895 with a proscenium, orchestra pit, raked seating
