Glimmerglass Opera, Cornell, the Notorious RBG and Me

With the death of the extraordinary attorney, judge, Supreme Court Justice, and champion of the rights of men and women, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, many articles, letters to the editors, and television commentaries describe the feelings of individuals who had even the slightest interaction with her. This essay is my version of touching greatness.

Figure 1. The Alice Busch Theater, Glimmerglass Opera Festival. Patrons arrive and park in a terraced parking field. They then cross the two lane New York State Highway 80, under the direction of crossing guards and reach the theater by crossing a meadow and skirting a large pond.

Every summer Alice Jo and I drove from Rochester, New York, our home, to the historic, picturesque and interesting central New York State village of Cooperstown to attend the Glimmerglass Opera Festival. The Festival is held in the Alice Busch Opera Theater situated eight miles north of Cooperstown. (Figure 1). The Theater has 918 seats, all within 70 feet of the stage, allowing natural amplification of its performances. When opened in 1987, it was the first American theater built expressly for opera in the 21 years following the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966.

Figure 2(A). The Otesaga Inn Front entrance.

Abutting the shore of the southern tip of Otsego Lake, which is nine miles long and the source of the Susquehanna River, is the village of Cooperstown, a community endowed with many treasures. The Otesaga Inn is the most charming of the village inns in which we have stayed. (Figure 2A and 2B) To sit on the veranda overlooking Otsego Lake while having breakfast, is an idyllic way to start the day, and to sit on the patio of the Hawkeye Grill for dinner is the best way to end it. A mile or so walk up the street is the James Fenimore Cooper house, the site of Cooper’s conception and execution of the Leatherstocking stories of frontier and Native American life, notably The Last of the Mohicans and Deerslayer. (Figure 3) The home is now the Fenimore Art Museum and a large added wing houses special exhibits and one of the foremost collection of Native American clothing, rugs, utensils, weaponry, pottery, artifacts, and other items, the Thaw Collection. It is the finest quality collection I have ever seen, including visits to the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Across the road and a bit south is the Farmer’s Museum, where the life of a country village of the 1850’s is recreated with farm buildings, a tavern, a blacksmith shop, a carousel, and programs enacting the life of a country village of that vintage. Last, but not least, the Baseball Hall of Fame and Abner Doubleday baseball field are situated off the village main street.

Figure 2(B). A view from Otsego Lake at sundown.

Remarkably, this small village in rural Otsego County is home to a very highly regarded hospital, the Mary Imogene Basset Hospital, a teaching site for students from Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Rochester Medical Center. It was the hospital to which the future Nobel Laureate, Edward Donnall (Don) Thomas, went from his medical fellowship at Harvard to be chief of medicine. In parallel with his clinical responsibilities, he established an experimental program in bone marrow stem cell transplantation in outbred beagle dogs. He developed the method of typing donor-recipient pairs, the dose of whole body radiation required to ablate hematopoiesis in the recipient, the dose of donor marrow required to restore blood cell formation, and the nature of the deleterious effects of graft- versus-host disease in which donor immune cells attack recipient tissues. In time, this program progressed to a few human transplants before Thomas moved to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington. There he established the most pioneering and successful human blood cell stem cell transplant program in the world, resulting in his sharing the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 for the development of human transplantation with his former colleague, Joseph E. Murray, at Harvard who pioneered kidney transplantation. Figure 4 shows Thomas, president of the American Society of Hematology passing the gavel to Marshall Lichtman, the incoming president (December 1988).

Figure 3. The Fenimore Art Museum on the property once owned by James Fenimore Cooper. It contains a collection of folk and fine art and other historical memorabilia. It has a collection of 20th century art, nineteenth century photography and the extraordinary Thaw Collection of nearly 900 examples of Native American Art and Artefacts. In addition, new traveling exhibits are brought to the Museum every year.

The Finger Lakes of which Otsego Lake is one of eleven (geographic polydactyly) long, narrow lakes that run roughly north south across New York State. The town of Ithaca sits at the foot of another Finger Lake, Cayuga Lake, approximately 40 miles long with an average width of 1.7 miles. “Far above Cayuga’s waters” sits Cornell University, the alma mater of then Ruth (Kiki) Bader(née Joan Ruth Bader) (Class of 1954) and Marshall Lichtman (Class of 1955). Kiki, as she was known then, was a member of Alpha Epsilon Phi, a “Jewish” sorority on Wycoff Avenue; I was a member of Beta Sigma Rho, a “Jewish” fraternity, on Westbourne Lane, some 200 yards from each other as the crow flies. Cornell was established as a non-sectarian university, whereas most American colleges were started by religious organizations. In contrast, Ezra Cornell’s vision was summarized in his statement: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” Of course, the realities were different. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton ostensibly had specific quotas for Jews. Cornell’s quota was de facto, not de jure. In 1950, of 57 fraternities at Cornell, 21 had explicit restrictive clauses barring Jews and “negroes” from membership. In 1968, The University Board required all fraternities and sororities to comply with a non-discrimination policy.

Kiki Bader and I overlapped at Cornell for three years and we were both in the College of Arts and Sciences; we did not ever meet. Our courses were somewhat divergent, I spent long hours in courses devoted to zoology, chemistry, physics and physiology, whereas her curriculum was heavy in the humanities. The buildings I frequented, Baker Hall (chemistry and physics) and Stimson Hall (zoology (biology) and physiology), were not those of a pre-law student. Nevertheless, the requirements at that time for English, history, and philosophy resulted in my most interesting courses, including the history of American architecture and painting in the School of Architecture and the American presidency taught by the great scholar of the presidency, Clinton Rossiter, and courses in world civilization and philosophy of religion. In any case, Kiki Bader and I never intersected while we were at Cornell.

Figure 4. Incoming President Marshall Lichtman (left) receiving the gavel from outgoing President Don Thomas at the American Society of Hematology meetings December 6th, 1988. Two years later, almost to the day on December 10th, 1990, Thomas received a Nobel Prize for his contribution to human organ transplantation.

Fast forward 61 years, Alice Jo and I are at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown for opera and the charms of the Otesaga Inn, recently renamed The Otesaga Resort Hotel, the crude efforts of marketing. Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet? I suspect its charm has been undimmed by this dysphoric name change. The Glimmer Glass Opera, although in a modest country opera house, with woods on either side of it, and Otsego Lake just to its east, offers the great young voices of opera, an excellent orchestra, innovative staging, and a remarkably creative and interactive director, Francesca Zambello. Zambello became a good friend of Justice Ginsberg when she directed the production of Beethoven’s Fidelio in 2003 in Washington, DC. It was performed in Constitution Hall, owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who had denied Marion Anderson from singing there because she was Black. Intrinsic to the plot in Fidelio, Leonore disguises herself as a man in order to rescue her husband from prison, a plot that resonates with the ability of women to play any role in life. Ginsberg wrote Zambello a letter saying it was the best Fidelio she had ever seen. That began a warm friendship between an opera lover and an opera director and producer. Zambello has pointed out that Ginsberg was particularly moved by operas in which women were the protagonist, as Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung. Ginsberg fell in love with opera at age 11 and she remained an ardent devotee, indeed a student of the genre, throughout her life. As a person who championed the art form and its messages of humor, love, jealousy, hate, ambition, intrigue, and redemption, she was embraced by opera singers and impresarios alike. She was even cast in a speaking role, the Duchess of Krackenthorp, in Donizetti’s La Fille Du Régiment in 2016 at the Washington National Opera. My interest in opera was kindled at Cornell. In my third year, I lived off campus, in Cayuga Heights, in a small suite in the upstairs rear of a home owned by the District Attorney of Tompkins County. He rented out this suite that had private access through a set of outside rear stairs. From time to time, on Saturday afternoon, my roommate and fraternity brother, Donald (Duke) Kopal, and I listened to the Texaco-sponsored radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Duke was already an aficionado. This resulted in a burgeoning interest on my part in this art form.

Justice Ginsberg’s love of opera was shared with her dear friend, but often judicial disputant, the conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Their judicial disagreements and, yet, warm friendship, provoked the one act opera Scalia/Ginsberg, performed at Glimmerglass in 2017 to a sell-out crowd. Written by composer-librettist Derrick Wang, it was first heard at the Supreme Court and then had its world premiere at the Castleton Festival under the baton of Loren Maazel. Ginsberg and Scalia wrote a forward for the libretto, which was published in the Columbia Journal of Law and Arts. At Zambello’s invitation, Justice Ginsberg visited Glimmerglass over nine summers to conduct a program “Law and the Opera with RBG”. She highlighted the fact that so many operas had a contract in their libretto or represented other legal issues, including various crimes, plea bargaining and other relevancies. The Law and Opera with RBG program included the performance of a relevant scene from an opera, followed by Ginsberg discussing the legal issue that it raised. On one occasion, circa 2015, Alice Jo and I were at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival when she was attending and presenting. At an intermission, held outdoors in an open-sided pavilion adjacent to the opera house, I sidled up to her as she was sipping her drink. She was standing alone at that moment and I took advantage of that circumstance and swept in beside her. This approach was not an easy task as I was confronted by two huge body guards, enormous men, who advised me not to get too close to the Justice. Their size was made more dramatic by the diminutive Justice over whom they hovered. I introduced myself and told her about our overlap at Cornell. We had a delightful conversation about Cornell and the young men, friends of mine, who she knew in “Beta sig”, my fraternity. The conversation lasted about 15 minutes and that was the last we saw of each other. Given her contributions to the law, to men and women’s rights, to equal justice and equal opportunity, I made up in a brief encounter for having not known her at school. Now when asked If I knew Kiki Bader when at Cornell, I can respond “No, but we did meet after we graduated!”

Written October 2020