Success Quote by Walter Legge

A throwaway complaint on the surface, Walter Legge's line is really a tiny manifesto about cultural power and taste. Legge wasn't an artist nursing sensitivities; he was the producer-arbiter who helped decide what counted as prestige in 20th-century classical music. When he says he "disliked singing in English", he's not merely quibbling about vowels. He's signaling allegiance to a hierarchy where Italian, German, and French were treated as the native languages of "serious" opera, while English often read as provincial, utilitarian, even faintly embarrassing. The subtext: authenticity is a sound, and English doesn't sound like authority.

The second half sharpens the blade. "Neither liked the story nor the character of Cressida" turns aesthetic judgment into a veto. Cressida, famously compromised by shifting loyalties in Shakespeare and later adaptations, is the kind of character who refuses easy heroism. Legge's distaste hints at a broader mid-century discomfort with moral ambiguity onstage, especially in a genre that thrived on grand passions and clear emotional contracts with the audience. He isn't rejecting complexity so much as rejecting what complexity does to marketability: it muddies identification, it complicates glamour, it makes applause less automatic.

Taken together, the sentence performs Legge's real job: converting personal taste into institutional reality. It's brisk, patrician, and final, the voice of someone used to closing doors - and confident the room will rearrange itself around his preferences.