The “oh no!” at news in the obituary that Manuel Marquez-Sterling was dead eventually turned into a smile as I recalled the bond based on our shared refugee background and love of opera. We met half a lifetime ago as board members of what was Opera League of New Hampshire (now Opera New Hampshire). Manny, a professor of history, had an intricate familiarity with opera and periodically appeared on “Opera Prelude,” my New Hampshire Public Radio show. He persuaded me to revisit the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer. “Meyerbeer was Wagner before Wagner was Wagner,” he’d say. During ONH offerings at the Palace Theater in Manchester, Manny spoke eruditely at pre-performance lectures.
During Ken Burns’ documentary series on baseball, I marveled at Manny’s wit and facile intellect as he compared the intricacies plus the satisfaction one gets from baseball to those in opera. Born continents apart, Manny and I shared the 20th-century political virus of communism. On a NH opera group tour of Italy, we couldn’t hold back tears at La Scala during “Nabucco’s” chorus of the Hebrew slaves. “Oh mia patria, si bella e perduta!” the exiled slaves in Babylon pined for their birthland. “Oh my homeland, so beautiful and lost!” – Manny’s Cuba under Fidel Castro; my Lithuania under Moscow’s totalitarian tentacles. This particular memory underscores the horrible truth that history is repeating itself in Ukraine. While I’ll be unable to be at his funeral, I’ll be thinking warmly of Manny and his wife.
Adolphe Bernotas
Penacook