On July 20, the Metropolitan Opera announced that Bill (William V.) McCourt, Assistant Stage Manager and Director of Supernumeraries for more than three decades; spouse of Met Stage Director David C. Kneuss; and resident of New York City and Fire Island Pines, had passed away several days earlier. An aficionado of ballet and opera, Bill had been a Met supernumerary, that is an extra or ‘spear carrier,’ himself, in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Don Carlo” and many other operas, before he was promoted to a management position, initially responsible for organizing the supers for the visiting Rome Opera’s productions of Verdi’s “I Due Foscari” and Gioachino Rossini’s “Otello” in the summer of 1968.
Bill and David were strong supporters of such organizations as the Fire Island Dance Festival/Dancers Responding to AIDS, the Fire Island Pines Property Owners Association, the Fire Island Pines Arts Project, and the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan. The couple contributed five recipes to “Into the Pines Kitchen: Fire Island Pines Arts Project Cookbook,” published in 2008, reviewed in these pages in July of that year.
Bill was related to the historic Elizabeth (Baby) McCourt Doe Tabor, whose story is told in Douglas Moore’s opera “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” and Bill’s aunt and other family members were honored guests at the work’s world premiere in Central City, Colorado on July 7, 1956.