Leadership Quote by John Eaton

A line like this is politics masquerading as taste: a tidy, self-sealing truth that sounds like wisdom because it can’t be falsified. Eaton isn’t really defending opera so much as defending hierarchy. “Very best” does all the work twice, turning a messy argument about art, patronage, and public value into a closed loop: the best operas are best because the best people made them. It’s an aesthetic version of credentialism, the kind of reasoning that flatters institutions and neutralizes dissent.

The intent reads as stabilizing. In the early-to-mid 19th century, opera in the Anglophone world was more than entertainment; it was a signal of refinement and an imported badge of European legitimacy. For an American politician of Eaton’s era, praising opera could be a way to align with “civilized” culture while avoiding the democratic discomfort of admitting that taste is contested and historically contingent. By grounding judgment in “the very best composers,” Eaton leans on authority, not argument.

The subtext is a quiet policing of who gets to decide. If greatness is defined by the already-anointed great, then new voices, popular forms, and local experiments don’t merely lose the debate; they’re disqualified from it. The sentence’s blandness is the tell: it’s designed to end conversation, not start one. In that sense it’s less a claim about music than a miniature of governing style - circular, deferential to elites, and allergic to ambiguity.