Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights is not only a deeply moving and dramatically convincing treatment of a mercilessly demanding subject—it is a real opera, in the sense that we have always understood opera. Here is music that is immediately accessible without being cheap or superficial; music that follows traditional paths in an original and confident manner; music that recognizes the basic laws and needs of the theatre. I emphasize this point because the far-out composers are getting all the critical attention, these days. Anybody who dishes up a serial score to a freakish libretto is more likely to be publicized than a composer like Floyd, who is not ashamed to be part of the mainstream of musical development and who is primarily concerned with communication to the best of his ability rather than with wild experimentation.