In Verdi's Shakespeare, Wills displays a deep knowledge of singers, often citing esoteric old recordings, reflecting his many hours poring through stacks of LPs in thrift stores (he still has a turntable). "Then later on, when we got married and she got pregnant, she couldn't stand for two (performances), so she would stand for one of them, whichever she preferred that day, and I would stand for both, then we would catch the late train back to New Haven. "We would go - first of all when we were engaged, then when we were married - and stand at the Old Met for the afternoon and evening performances," he said. Wills listened to lots of opera recordings at the Jesuit boarding school he attended in Wisconsin, but it wasn't until he was in graduate school at Yale in the 1950s that he and his wife, Natalie, also an opera fan, started going to performances on a regular basis at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. I couldn't ride my bike and had to walk them home."
The Magic Flute was such a huge pile of 78s, I had to bring them home in two trips. "The first opera to catch my fancy was The Magic Flute, so I went to the library in Adrian to check out the records. "In grade school, I listened to the Metropolitan Opera Saturday broadcasts," said Wills, 77, who grew up in Adrian, Mich. With Sarasota Opera staging Otello, which opens next weekend, I put in a call to Wills to talk about the opera, reaching him at his home in Evanston, Ill., where he is emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University.
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