内容摘要：To get some local expertise, I reached out to Marshall Jones, an airboat tour operator I met a few months earlier who grew up in the Everglades and is involved in environmental protection. I asked him if he would be willing to show me the impact the drought was having in his area. With his airboat tours shut down due to low water levels, he graciously spent two hours walking me through the surrounding area, showing me where depleted canals were growing grass on exposed mud, where normally waterlogged marsh was now dry enough to walk on and where waterways typically navigable year-round by airboat had completely dried up. When we got to this pond apple forest that usually sat in a foot or more of water, I knew I wanted to find a picture there. There was one group of trees set closely together that drew my attention right away, but without another element it wasn’t going to make a picture, so I continued following Jones and his two dogs as they explored the area. When one of the dogs went over to lie down on the wet patch of soil amid the trees I’d spotted, I circled back to the framing I’d seen before and knew I had a shot.

To get some local expertise, I reached out to Marshall Jones, an airboat tour operator I met a few months earlier who grew up in the Everglades and is involved in environmental protection. I asked him if he would be willing to show me the impact the drought was having in his area. With his airboat tours shut down due to low water levels, he graciously spent two hours walking me through the surrounding area, showing me where depleted canals were growing grass on exposed mud, where normally waterlogged marsh was now dry enough to walk on and where waterways typically navigable year-round by airboat had completely dried up. When we got to this pond apple forest that usually sat in a foot or more of water, I knew I wanted to find a picture there. There was one group of trees set closely together that drew my attention right away, but without another element it wasn’t going to make a picture, so I continued following Jones and his two dogs as they explored the area. When one of the dogs went over to lie down on the wet patch of soil amid the trees I’d spotted, I circled back to the framing I’d seen before and knew I had a shot.

“I really did think they were joking,” she recalled. “My colleague, Christopher Ventris, said, ‘No. No. They’re not joking. You have to be careful.’”Stemme went home to Sweden, considered the offer with vocal coach Richard Trimborn and made her Isolde debut on May 19, 2003, at the Glyndebourne Festival with Robert Gambill as Tristan and Jiří Bělohlávek conducting. She chose to sing her final two Isoldes 22 years later with the Philadelphia Orchestra and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who conducted the opera for the first time on June 1 and coaxed a luminous rendition from a premier orchestra at its peak.

“I’m 62 now. I gave it to my 60s to sing these big roles and now I’ve dropped Elektra and Brünnhilde, and Isolde is the last daughter on stage that I’m singing,” Stemme said. “I decided this years ago. This is how it works and every year that I was able to sing Isolde feels like a bonus and a privilege.”Stemme was friends with Birgit Nilsson, one of the greatest Isoldes and Brünnhildes, who died in 2005 at age 87.“I was on the verge to go down to her in south Sweden to study Isolde but of course me as a young singer with little kids at home, I never felt ready,” Stemme said. “At that time when we got to know each other, I was singing mostly a lyric repertoire.”

Skelton sang with Stemme in Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer” at the Vienna State Opera in 2004 and his Tristan was paired with Stemme’s Isolde in New York, Munich and Naples, Italy.“It’s as radiant now as it was when I first heard her sing it in Glyndebourne way back in the day,” he said. “No one knew really who Nina Stemme was to a certain extent. Certainly I don’t think anyone was ready for what she brought to Isolde even then.”

Nézet-Séguin first worked with Stemme in a performance of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007, didn’t collaborate again until performances of Strauss’ “Die Frau ohne Schatten” at the Met last fall.

“The breadth of her experience with the role is just guiding all of us, me, but also the orchestra, who is playing it for the first time in understanding the flow of the piece, understanding their shades and the colors, and that is invaluable,” Nézet-Séguin said of Stemme’s Isolde. “It was wonderful for me to benefit from it.”Both Bareilles and Keenan-Bolger are involved with the Gavin Creel Fellowship, an initiative that plans to provide $25,000 grants to five emerging theater actors each year.

Sarah Bareilles and host Cynthia Erivo perform “Tomorrow” during the in memoriam segment (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)Sarah Bareilles and host Cynthia Erivo perform “Tomorrow” during the in memoriam segment (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

The final award had been announced— best musical to “Maybe Happy Ending” — and the audience started to disperse. But Erivo had another idea.