He didn’t want to leave any interesting detail unspoken, and he was so pleased to be in an environment where his highly specialized fund of knowledge was acknowledged.”įather Lee wrote more than 20 books, on subjects ranging from opera to movies to the Roman poets Horace and Virgil. “He knew a great deal, and he wanted to make sure that what he knew got on the air. “He really wanted to get them right,” said the pianist Brian Zeger, the artistic director of the vocal arts program at the Juilliard School, who was a panelist alongside Father Lee and later a host. Sometimes they are asked to identify the singer in a recording of an excerpt.įather Lee was a competitive contestant whose hand often went up first. (Listeners are now invited to submit questions on the program’s website.) Sometimes they are asked to name the opera from which a familiar-sounding melody of an aria has been taken. On the opera quiz, a panel of three experts - music critics, record producers and well-known fans like Father Lee - field questions.

“Anti-Wagnerians said that I had made them surrender at last to the composer’s spell religious people told me I had strengthened their faith Jungians thanked me for explaining the archetypes.” “Wagnerians said that I had stated for them the essence of Wagner’s meaning,” he wrote. All broadcasts begin at 12pm Saturdays on WNIU.Father Lee - who discarded his first initial, for Mark, on the air - was proud to say that he received 100 letters of thanks after he did a segment on Wagner’s last opera, “Parsifal.”

The 2022-2023 season will mark the 92nd year of Saturday broadcasts and will again be heard over the Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network. The Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday matinee broadcasts are the longest-running continuous classical music program in radio history.

Met opera schedule radio broadcasts