Emotional Anatomies

In his forthcoming book, The Impossible Art, composer Matthew Aucoin likens his early immersion in opera not to the pageantry of going to a live performance, but rather to the solitude of reading a book. “Operas, like the young-adult fiction I was reading at the time, felt to me like interior adventures rather than extravagant spectacles,” he writes, adding in the following chapter that “opera can, at its best, spark a liberating uncertainty—call it the negative capability—in the listener.”