Larry Wolff is Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University.  His most recent book, about Die Frau ohne Schatten, is The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy (2023).  His books also include  The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (2016), Paolina's Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova's Venice (2012), The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010), and Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994).  He writes frequently about opera, publishing essays and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Hudson Review.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. When he was six years old his father took him to the opera to see Aida, the beginning of a lifelong passion.