Merry Widow was played over loudspeakers, and I skated around in pure bliss." She cites the work as supporting her belief that light music can be as great in its own way as Mozart's in his. "It has some of the most genuine, emotionally honest music ever composed, and some of the orchestrations just break your heart. It's sweet, but it's also real, with an adorable story that can be by turns funny, tender and harsh." She was Hanna Glawari in Paris (1998), at the Teatro Colón (2001) and in San Francisco (2002). And it was waltzing with the Count Danilo Danilovitsch of Plácido Domingowho had first sung with her in a Tosca on a Met visit to Cleveland, Ohio on April 29, 1970that she thought it fitting to bring her thirty years at the Met to a close (2000). American opera The opera of her native land was an important component of von Stade's career almost from its beginning. In Houston in 1974, she was the infatuated ingénue Ninasharing the stage with her maternal grandmother in a bit part in the premiere of Thomas Pasatieri's The Seagull. (She is fond of recalling that on opening night, her dressing room was knee deep in roses, all of them for Mrs Clucas.) In Dallas in 1988, she starred as the vulnerable spinster Tina in the televised premiere of Dominick Argento's The Aspern Papers. In San Francisco in 1994, she was the vicious and manipulative Marquise de Merteuil in the televised premiere of Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons"I thought, who can compete with Glenn Close? So I didn't even try"finally granting the director Frank Corsaro his wish of two decades earlier that she would one day play "a real bitch". In 2014, she starred as the embittered nonagenarian Myrtle Bledsoe in Ricky Ian Gordon's A Coffin in Egypt in its premiere in Houston, reprising the role at Opera Philadelphia (2014) and at the Chicago Opera Theater (2015) and, in concert, in Wynton Marsalis's Jazz at Lincoln Center (2016). And in 2018, she returned to Opera Philadelphia to create the role of Danny, a woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's dementia, in the world premiere of Lembit Beecher's Sky on Swings. The Beecher project was one of her most personal: her aunts Carol and Marjorie had both fallen prey to Alzheimer's, and she hoped that, as well helping its audience to understand