Leadership Quote by John Eaton

Eaton’s line is doing two jobs at once: it sketches a tidy origin story for opera, and it quietly flatters the idea that “high culture” is born from deliberate, almost legislative intent. “Began with an intent” is the giveaway. Art, in his framing, isn’t an accident or a street-level eruption; it’s a project with a mission statement. For a politician, that’s not neutral language. It’s the vocabulary of committees, reforms, restorations - culture as something designed, revived, and supervised.

The chosen ancestor matters, too. Greek drama is the West’s most convenient cultural receipt: invoke it and you inherit seriousness, civic purpose, and the aura of antiquity. Eaton leans on that authority to make opera feel less like aristocratic spectacle and more like a continuation of public-minded ritual. That’s the subtext: opera’s prestige is not merely aesthetic; it’s genealogical. If it descends from Athens, then it belongs in the realm of institutions, patronage, and national identity.

His parenthetical - “that is, modern opera as we know it” - reveals anxiety about messy history. The real development of opera is tangled: Florentine humanists, court entertainment, changing musical tastes, money. Eaton smooths that into a clean before-and-after, a narrative of recovery. It’s a politician’s approach to culture: emphasize origins that confer legitimacy, ignore the compromises, and present evolution as destiny rather than dispute.