It started out as a simple document with dozens of clippings pasted in from various websites, articles, and other sources, and now it’s a 6-episode podcast that we have home grown for one purpose only: We’re preparing to see La Traviata at the Met in a few short weeks. Our first opera! And we want to be prepared.
You may have seen us posting pictures of our 1899 attire — it’s all part of research for our romance novel we’re collaborating on, painstaking research, we assure you — and we have an incredible day planned filled with sight-seeing, opera-watching, leg-of-lamb eating (that’s not a joke, looking at you Keen’s Steakhouse), all in our late Gilded Age clothing.
One thing we have spent less time on, however, is preparing for the actual opera itself. Yes, we have to write a whole seven chapters where our hopeful lovers attend the opera on the season opening night in December of 1899 (accompanied by the wrong people!) but how can we possibly do this if neither of us has ever been to the opera? So, we’ve committed to spending 3.5 hours in the Met itself listening to what is arguably one of the most famous operas in history and want to know what in the world we’re doing.
That’s where the dozens of articles, book chapters, and other references came in, not to mention the many, many YouTube videos about La Traviata, highlighting the arias, the performers, and the staging. But it was starting to seem like too many things strewn across too many different media. That’s when one of us had an idea: Convert all those notes into show notes for a podcast and then, well, produce it!
The good news is that one of us has all of those skills just lying around, so it was a matter of squeezing in time on nights and weekends (got up this morning at 5 to put an extra couple of hours in before work) and voila, you have episode 1, affectionately titled “What’s Opera Doc?” for reasons you will find out soon enough if you just click the play button up there.
Episode 2 will be finished over the weekend, and then we have to get 4 more done in time for the long drive to New York from Boston in a few weeks. We should be able to make it.
We would love it if you listened, liked it, and shared it with others. This is taking more time than planned, and though we love every minute of it, it will be easier to find those minutes if we know people are enjoying it. Thank you!
Note: If there’s interest, we’ll eventually share how we pulled this together, it involves a lot of experimental tools plus hours of tweaking to get it right. Not to mention leaving so many juicy bits on the cutting room floor because we can’t pack everything of interest into even six podcast bits. It’s a lot like working on a novel, come to think of it.
