Gay Talese Takes in Traviata

(Photo: Jason Andrew/Financial Times)

"Gay Talese has hated opera for almost all of his 78 years. The legendary journalist’s father, a tailor, played it all the time in his shop in Ocean City, New Jersey, and at night, after dinner. “For Italian-Americans, opera was about the only respectable thing they had going for them,” Talese says. “Otherwise, it was just mafia, mafia, mafia. And, of course, Mussolini.” The young Talese wanted to be American, not Italian, so he resented the Verdi and Puccini, this soundtrack to the boyhood he didn’t want to have. And yet, here we are, more than half a century later, going to see La Traviata."