Although it appears that Oja did not look into all this with the thoroughness one might expect, let us grant that despite the nominally Swedish setting, the Met’s production played “as if” in Boston in at least some respects, and that though the creators were not very concerned with historical accuracy, we might like a fig leaf or two of plausibility. The Judge’s role is the least prominent in the opera, present solely for plot purposes. At the morning audience of the day in question, he brings before “Riccardo” a demand for the banishment of Ulrica and, in a line obviously written with Boston in mind, describes her as belonging to “the filthy [immondo] race of Negroes.”^(I) Would such an open prejudice have been likely from such a person in that time and place? Of course. And would the presence of a Negro seeress near Boston in this 1690s make historical sense? I haven’t done my homework, but I should think so. Ulrica could easily have been from anywhere in the Caribbean—Haiti or Santo Domingo, possibly—and have brought with her the mystical religious arts of her culture to set up shop. She’d be analogous to Tituba, the black servant from Barbados, whom Arthur Miller (who did do his homework) placed in the Proctors’ Salem household at this very time. Insofar as the Judge’s racist line is concerned, the point is that while Oja seems to assume that it reflects the creators’ bias, in what follows our sympathies are enlisted entirely in the opposite direction. True, Ulrica is part of the exotica, as have been many characters in European opera. I won’t open up the subject of such ethnic outsiders in the E-19 repertory here, except to note that a number of commentators have considered Ulrica an immediate descendant of the gypsy Azucena in Il Trovatore, and that there’s an obvious parallel in how these two low-voiced females are first seen, staring fixedly into a fire while intoning a baleful solo.^(II) And though Ulrica’s gifts of Luciferous prophecy are treated with ambivalence, she is in no way an unsympathetic personage. Amelia, the opera’s heroine, seeks her advice, and heeds it. Riccardo treats her with friendly skepticism, then slips into Silvano’s pocket the promotion that fulfills her prophecy. She foresees Riccardo’s assassination, and that prophecy is also fulfilled, without any outside assistance. The scene is one of a caper turned dark, then pulled back to light by its choral finale in praise of Riccardo’s magnaminity, and its overall effect is to instruct the audience in a liberalizing direction.