By: Robbie Whelan

Back in December, the Baltimore Opera Company quietly filed for bankruptcy. It was Chapter 7, the kind a company doesn’t come back from, and later this month, the company will begin auctioning off its assets. At the time of the filing, I sort of kicked myself because going to the opera here in Baltimore was always something I had meant to do. You know, put on a thrift-store tuxedo, have a nice dinner with a few cocktails, then go do something civilized. But I never got around to it, and as they say, you don’t miss your water…

Last night The Story, a public radio news magazine based in North Carolina, broadcast a beautifully-produced homage to the Baltimore Opera Company vis-a-vis an extended interview recorded in the Baltimore studios of WYPR with Grant Striegel, a local man who saw his first opera at the Lyric Opera House at age 11, and immediately fell in love with the genre and with the place. Striegel’s manner of speech — straightforward, earnest, unadorned with sentimentalism or emotion — is so touching and honest, that when describing how nice world-famous soprano Rosa Ponsell was to him, or how when he was in grade school, the blaring trumpets on stage during Aida had wowed him, but then the closing death scene had made him weep, it all made me kick myself even more for not taking advantage of the place. Streigel also tells a hilarious story about visiting Ponsell’s villa in the Greenspring Valley, and offered the choice of any gourmet food for lunch he could ever dream of, he was so nervous all he could think to ask for was a tuna fish sandwich.

What’s so powerful about this is that Striegel is such a normal guy. He’s not a wealthy, over-educated or over-cultured aristocrat. He’s a working-class Baltimorean, the son of a machine-shop manager. He played in a Motown cover band called The Flying Circus that gigged in Ocean City in the summertime for tourists.  But on Thursday nights, Striegel would attend the premieres of the opera season at the Lyric. He says:

There’s nothing that moves me like, if I listen to Parsifal by Wagner…That just takes me to a new plane. If it can take you to a new plane and you can be with the angels even for just a few seconds, that to me is the measure of great art.

This piece is the first really involved piece I’ve heard on the Baltimore Opera Co., at least from one of its patrons. I recommend listening to it for anyone who isn’t completely sure of the value of our local cultural institutions, which are rapidly disappearing, and what they mean to regular people.

Listen to the interview and tribute from The Story here.