Don Moreland came to classical music late in his youth. He vividly remembers the precise moment when he discovered opera:

I did not discover classical music and particularly opera until a much later age, 14 to be exact. As a student at Concordia College in Milwaukee, a prep school for Lutheran ministers, I turned on the radio one Saturday afternoon and heard, to my intense pleasure and astonishment, singers singing in a language I did not understand and singing with beauty and powerful emotions. What were they saying? Why were they saying it - or rather, - singing it? Who were they? What was the story? I had to know.

This was, of course a Saturday broadcast from the Metropolitan opera and the beginning of my fascination with a story that is sung, not merely told, with human feelings, expressed and enlarged through music. It was a heady experience and still is.

I rushed to the library. I discovered the libretto, the actual written words - Carmen, Rigoletto, La Boheme - like small plays I could read quickly. The who, the what, the why... all became clear. I had found the key that unlocked the drama. To this day, reading a new libretto is a special delight. Another world is opening. A new voice is being heard.

(Photos courtesy of Myron Fink)

After seven years in the Lutheran seminary, Don Moreland found his true calling. He entered the University of Illinois as a music student. There, in 1954, he met Myron Fink when he sang one of the lead parts in The Boor, Fink's first opera based on a Chekov short story. Their professional lives were linked from then on: Myron followed the music, Don went after the story... and the drama. A few years later, he graduated from the Yale School of Drama. In 1960 he went to Germany on a Fulbright opera grant to collaborate with the famed composer Paul Hindemith on the American premier of his comic opera,"News of the Day" (Neues vom Tage). And when it premiered in 1961, he was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera of New Mexico to stage it. He has also directed Verdi's Macbeth and Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia.