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Reviews

'A Book of Hours is a feast, a joy, and an insightful and powerful journey into the inner thoughts of the man himself.' Irene Sloan, Founding Editor, The Opera Quarterly 'No one explains more compellingly [than Father Lee] why every human being should care about the stories of the great operas. Who else so convincingly illuminates the links between Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Walt Whitman's poetry; the simple human message underlying Verdi's meandering La Forza del Destino; or the reasons why Wagner's rarely performed Rienzi is his most characteristic work? Readers will come away reassured that opera speaks not just to our visceral passions but also to our deepest spiritual essence.' Commonweal

Author Information

M. Owen Lee, a member of the Basilian Fathers, is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, where he recently received an Outstanding Teacher Award and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Author of books of Virgil's Aeneid and Horace's Odes, he is best-known for his books on opera: First Intermissions, Wagner's Ring, A Season of Opera, and The Operagoer's Guide. Father Owen Lee is to opera what Chesterton's Father Brown was to crime detection. For 20 years Father Lee has been a beloved presence on the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday afternoon Chevron-Texaco broadcasts as an always knowledgeable guest on Opera Quiz and as an ever-insightful commentator on operatic stories, music, and themes. A classics professor in his ""day job,"" Father Lee is the author of 14 books, mostly on opera. A Book of Hours is a departure for Father Lee: a personal memoir, cast in the form of a secular breviary, that recreates a year Father Lee spent teaching at an American college campus in Rome over a quarter century ago. The book draws together in an intricate web of refracting relationships the three great loves of Father Lee's life: opera, literature, and his life and work as a priest. A Eurail pass allowed him to visit all the great opera houses of Europe, which in turn reflected on his teaching in the classroom during the week: Homer and Virgil, Whitman and Rilke. And all of this is set in the context of a personal crisis-impending hearing loss, theological doubts, and the celibate's inevitable regret, at age forty, that he cannot share his remaining years with children of his own. In this inspiring and beautifully crafted book, Father Lee shows us how religious faith and a deeply humanistic culture need never be enemies, but rather can be a source of mutual enrichment.

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