Three Men Standing at the Met
Remembering the radio producer John Quinn who died in January 2026. John Quinn began working in RTÉ as Education Officer in 1975 and became a radio producer in 1977. For the next quarter of a century he produced and presented many memorable programmes for RTÉ Radio including the forward looking Open Mind series of interviews with prominent educators, philosophers, performers, scientists and leaders from various other walks of life. This week the Lyric Feature celebrates John’s work as a radio documentary maker whose programmes across a range of topics achieve a rare authentic simplicity which belies the artfulness of their construction.
In Three Men Standing at the Met we find the writer Michael Coady listening to a broadcast of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino from the Metropolitan Opera in New York in his home in Carrick-on-Suir Co. Waterford and reflecting on a November night in 1927 when his father and two uncles attended the same opera at the Met. Reconstructed in part from the émigrés letters and using Verdi’s music as counterpoint the programme brings the real lived experience of emigration in the 1920s with a refreshing and engaging specificity.
RTÉ lyric fm, Sunday 1st February, 6pm-7pm
