“Irina makes this long speech about her husband over the slow movement of the 14th Quartet,” Setzer said of his wife’s biggest scene in the show. “In a sense, it’s an aria. It’s just that she’s not singing it; she speaks it. But it easily could have been an aria if [Shostakovich] had finished the opera … we’re trying to finish the story for him without stepping over the line of actually saying we’re going to write this opera he didn’t. We’re too respectful of his genius to try and do that.”

Source: Los Angeles Times May 07, 2019 00:56 UTC