Richard Flusser

About the Book

Richard Flusser and the After Dinner Opera Company  tells the tale of a little opera company that could.

An opera lover since childhood, Richard Flusser founded the After Dinner Opera Company in 1950. Through the thick and thin of  fifty years and always on a shoestring, he and his wife Beth, with dozens of talented singers, have produced hundreds of American comic operas, many of them historic debuts: in 1956 the ADO became the first American company to take American operas to Europe.

While coping with backstage crises and two growing kids in their East Village home, the Flussers stuck to their dream of bringing American opera to audiences in New York, across the country, and around the world. In doing so, they have championed countless composers and librettists, including Ned Rorem, Seymour Barab, and Gertrude Stein. The book’s appendix, listing the seventy-seven American operas produced by the ADO, gives a measure of the Flusser’s lasting contribution to American musical theater.

A heart-warming and humorous book, Richard Flusser and the After Dinner Opera Company  will make inspiring reading for anyone who knows the joys and pains of life devoted to the creative arts.

Michael Lydon, a writer and musician, is the author of Richard Flusser and the After Dinner Opera Company  and three other books on American music: Rock Folk, Boogie Lightning and Ray Charles: Man and Music.

Richard Hall, a noted writer on opera, wrote the introduction to Richard Flusser and the After Dinner Opera Company . His insights into the ADO’s half century of achievement, and the fun the Flussers have had along the way, provide an excellent summary of this informative and enjoyable book.

From Richard Hall’s introduction to Richard Flusser and the After Dinner Opera Company:

“We haven’t learned to lose money yet. The closest we came was in our 1950 season, when we lost $2.50. I guess we’ll have to do better than that if we’re going to get a subsidy!” Richard Flusser's black eyes were bright with laughter as he delivered these sentiments. Founder, producer, and director of the After Dinner Opera Company, Flusser has built his group into the oldest permanent floating chamber-opera group in the country--no mean trick for a troupe without a home theater and with a taste for contemporary music.

The After Dinner Opera owes its success to its style, which is both exotic and delicate--rather like a banana soufflé--and to its material, which could be described as modestly madcap. The ADO specializes in instant operatic fun, in works that are quaintly mythological, pseudo-folkish, cheerfully sexy. One critic has described its output as “opera of the absurd,” and the name suits. In a single evening, the company may bounce through as many as seven short works, each zanier than the one before, none lasting more than twenty minutes. If you think of Harpo Marx in A Night at the Opera, swinging through the air on ropes and dropping the wrong sets behind the tenor, you’ll get some idea of the mayhem involved.

For all its friskiness, however, the ADO has serious musical ambitions: to provide a testing ground for young composers and help them master their art. Therein lies the chief paradox of its existence: “Are we musical comedy or opera?” Flusser has lived with the paradox for years and cheerfully admits its insolubility. “We manage to offend almost everyone,” he says...

About the Author

While coping with backstage crises and two growing kids in their East Village home, the Flussers stuck to their dream of bringing American opera to audiences in New York, across the country, and around the world. In doing so, they have championed countless composers and librettists, including Ned Rorem, Seymour Barab, and Gertrude Stein. The book’s appendix, listing the seventy-seven American operas produced by the ADO, gives a measure of the Flusser’s lasting contribution to American musical theater. Michael Lydon, a writer and musician, is the author of three other books on American music: Rock Folk, Boogie Lightning and Ray Charles: Man and Music.