In 1980, the medievalist, philosopher, and semiotician Umberto Eco took the international reading public by storm with his murder mystery The Name of the Rose, set in an Italian monastery in 1327. Forty years on, the novel stands in 21st place on Wikipedia’s list of best-selling books of all time, behind the top three (A Tale of Two Cities, Le Petit Prince, Paulo Coelho’s O Alquimista) as well as Heidi, The Da Vinci Code, Dr. Spock, and Lolita—but ahead of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Bill W.’s Alcoholics Anonymous, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Wayne Dyer’s Your Erogenous Zones. But to Eco, his debut novel qualified as an “opera buffa.” So, it’s intriguing to learn that the Pisan-born composer Francesco Filidei’s musical treatment employs “a central symphonic structure as rootstock for a succession of arias and recitative, nearly closed forms whose substance derives principally from the variation of Gregorian melodies.” Wow. Lucas Meacham sings William of Baskerville, the Sherlock Holmes of the story, with Kate Lindsey as his Watson, Adso of Melk. Daniela Barcelona is cast as Bernard Gui, the Grand Inquisitor. The production is in the hands of the red-hot Damiano Michieletto. The conductor is Ingo Metzmacher, known to German readers for eye-and-ear-opening books on opera throughout history and adventures in new music from Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg to Luigi Nono and John Cage. —Matthew Gurewitsch