As the glorious strains of Handel filled the opera house on a recent July evening, an aroma of farm manure wafted through the ventilation. Talk about opera in the boondocks. At the annual Glimmerglass Opera Festival in Cooperstown, New York, productions are staged in a barnlike structure that overlooks Otsego Lake, which is scarcely less spoiled now than it was nearly 200 years ago, when it provided a setting for James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales (in which the lake was called Glimmerglass). In the nearby village is the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Stretching in all directions is rolling farmland, Grant...
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