Bringing Cleopatra Back to Life

Professor Joe McClinton has been a self-described “opera geek” since he was a freshman in high school checking opera recordings out of his local library in Penn­sylvania. In the intervening years, he mastered German, Italian, and French and even had aspirations at one point to become a conductor. Still, when the opportunity came years later to join forces with Celiné Ricci, the indefatigable founder and artistic director of Ars Minerva, to help translate a long-lost opera from the early years of the tradition in Venice, it seemed like a match made in heaven.