By ALAN RIDING [NY Times, 30 October 2006]

MUNICH, Oct. 28 —This city’s love affair with opera, now more than 350 years old, has survived the fires that regularly razed 18th- and 19th-century theaters as well as regime changes, revolutions, two world wars and, most recently, the reduction of crucial subsidies from Bavaria’s regional government. In that context a change of command at the Bavarian State Opera can hardly be deemed traumatic.