A minute before curtain up, Stricklend takes his seat in the front row of the balcony. He has timed his arrival with care. As a latecomer he would have drawn unwanted attention to himself, or even risked being kept out until the end of the first act. Had he arrived early, on the other hand, he might have been drawn into unwelcome conversation with someone in an adjoining seat. On the whole, experience has taught him, operagoers are a garrulous and sociable breed, given to striking up acquaintances based on a mutual liking for Wagner or Puccini, or a desire in common to participate in the activity of being an audience, and therefore responding to a performance as one amorphous whole. It would surprise no one who knows Nicholas Stricklend to hear that he does not share this taste for communal behavior. Indeed, on the occasions where a simple desire to experience sublime music compels him to purchase a ticket, he does so in spite of, not because of, his fellow devotees. He would much prefer an auditorium empty save for himself and those on stage. On this particular November night, however, it is not the program that has lured him from the pleasant solitude of his apartment. He is not a lover of Mozart, deeming his work to be irritatingly frivolous, in the main. And he finds a theater full of those who seek out such light entertainment to have a childish buzz and fidget about it that is as tiresome as it is distracting.