Citizen Kane "Stage" magazine compared the film's narrative to "Faust" and made no mention of Hearst. The film was scheduled to premiere at RKO's flagship theater Radio City Music Hall on February 14, but in early January 1941 Welles was not finished with post-production work and told RKO that it still needed its musical score. Writers for national magazines had early deadlines and so a rough cut was previewed for a select few on January 3, 1941 for such magazines as "Life", "Look" and "Redbook". Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (and Hollywood correspondent for Hearst papers Louella Parsons' arch rival) showed up to
Michael Korie by the composer from forty-five minutes of text and music extracted from the opera's third act requiem before its premiere. The work was presented in London as part of the Maida Vale Concerts series in 2002, performed by the BBC Symphony. In February 2015, a new semi-staged concert version drawn from the entire opera was presented in Melbourne, Australia, directed by Cameron Lukie, and again in Sydney in 2016. Wallace and Korie's next opera, the three-character ninety-minute "Hopper's Wife", imagines Josephine Hopper, wife of painter Edward Hopper, transformed into the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Of its premiere at Long Beach