The Tragic Opera of Pandemic New York City

On Tuesday, 10 March 2020, I crossed Central Park from my office, near the Metropolitan Museum, to Lincoln Center, a New York City cultural hub. Passing the Henry Moore sculpture in the reflecting pool by the Beaumont Theater, devotees of dance streamed into the New York City Ballet. The park for the Big Apple Circus was dark. Students of the performing arts were rehearsing at the Julliard School. I passed the Chagall paintings in the opera lobby on my way to Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. On stage, a ghostlike man would shortly appear on a ship moored in a harbour; a pall of dread would infuse the townspeople - and the opera audience.

On Wednesday, 11 March 2020, a physician friend sent urgent advice that I -and my colleagues - leave our offices, as we and our patients were endangered by an ominous virus if sitting together in intimate rooms. That night, the artists and crews of the Metropolitan Opera were told the season was ending, the house was closing and they were furloughed without pay for the foreseeable future. It was as if Wagner's doomed ship had docked.

Since then, there have been no performances in Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Broadway or Off-Broadway, theaters, concert or ballet halls. The city's many museums and galleries shuttered, while exhibits, including the collection on the US Constitution at the New York Historical Society, closed (see https://www.nyhistory.org/exhibitions/colonists-citizens-constitutions). Restaurants that had paid kitchen staff, and aspiring actors and dancers serving tables upfront, were emptied.

Six months later, my next opera experience exemplified how, on the fringes, roofs, corner lots and computer screens, the artists and arts of New Yok have struggled for a presence. A neurologist colleague, Gayatri Devi, while walking through Central Park, had heard the singing of arias. At Bethesda Fountain, a petite Russian soprano with an enormous voice sang to a rapt, music-starved