Presented by Norm Hollingshead.
Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti was one of the most prolific (and popular) opera composers of the last half of the 20th Century with more than two dozen operas to his credit. The Consul is set in an unnamed totalitarian country in the mid-20th Century. It is a grim story of cold War politics, in which Magda Sorel, the embattled wife of a political fugitive, tries to keep herself, her infant child, and her aged mother-in-law alive as her husband evades the secret police. her only hope is to receive an all important visa from the Consul, but to do that she must surmount a bureaucratic nightmare.