she appeared in her house debut with the Washington Opera (1974) in the piece's first American staging. She was Penelope again in her house debut with the New York City Opera (1976), subsequently stepping into Baker's shoes under Leppard's direction at Glyndebourne in 1979 and reprising the role in San Francisco (1990) andin Glen Wilson's austere editionin Los Angeles (1997). She returned to Monteverdi in the autumn of her career, performing the smaller role of the scorned empress Ottavia in L'incoronazione di Poppea in Houston (2006) and in Los Angeles (2006). She collaborated with Leppard on an unhappier baroque enterprise in 1980, singing Iphise in a televised, ultra-modernist staging of Rameau's Dardanus in Paris. One of Leppard's books recounts the project's troubles, which included a clowning violist, an incompetent organist. wire-flown singers who squeaked with terror and a producer and designer who abandoned their creation midway through its run. Von Stade thought the staging so inept that after the exit of its authors, she felt obliged to take control of it and try to repair its infelicities herself. Leppard described the experience as the worst of his conducting life, an agonizing episode that left a permanent scar on his psyche. Handel's Serse was the only other baroque opera in which von Stade appeared, and the only British opera in her entire curriculum vitae. Singing its title role in a staging by Stephen Wadsworth in Santa Fe in 1993 withoutby her own admissionadequate preparation, she suffered a disastrous memory lapse in the opening lines of her first major aria. (Slightly dyslexic, she sometimes finds learning scores difficult.) "I'm here to tell you that you don't actually die from shame", she said to her manager afterwards. "You might like to, you might wish you couldbut you don't." She revisited Serse in her house debut at Seattle Opera when Wadsworth's production was revived there in 1997. 18th-century opera Mozart is von Stade's favourite composer (and also the historical figure whom she most admires). She thinks that Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro was to some extent autobiographical: "In many respects he is the spirit of Mozart. That's how I imagine [Mozart] to have acted and looked, from his letters. I think [Cherubino is] very close to his character without the dark side." In particular, she sees the composer and his creation as both "little devils", sharing the "bug-eyed admiration of women" that she