Our research continues. This episode includes all the notes we compiled about how the beloved opera, La Traviata, was conceived. No spoilers here, you have to listen, but it’s an amazing story and so richly embedded in the world Verdi lived in that we had to do a complete episode just on how and why this opera was even written. (And how fast it was written — again, no spoilers here, but it was astonishingly fast!)
If this is your first peek at what we’re doing, you just need to know that we’re a madly in love couple writing a romance novel together set in the late Gilded Age. Thirty five years of marriage is a topic we understand, writing a romance novel is, well, novel for us, so we’re digging deep into the research to make sure we make this book worth reading. Since the central part of our story as we’ve mapped it out depends on our lovers attending the opera seated across from each other in the Met’s Diamond Horseshoe — on dates with other people! — we feel we need to attend a Met opera so we can render it more fully for our characters. That’s why we’ll be attending La Traviata, in period attire, at the end of March and we couldn’t be more excited. Or more intimidated since neither of us have ever been to the opera.
These podcast episodes came out out our eagerness to fully prepare for the experience. We had compiled probably 50 pages of notes about La Traviata and realized we had no easy way to condense and consume them together so we generated a podcast that would make the topics easy to parse but intriguing to follow, originally structured in 5 different segments that then blossomed into a total of 6 when we realized we needed a whole episode just on Violetta (episode 2.5, coming soon!).
In this episode we hint a bit at the process for assembling these recordings — it’s very time intensive but rewarding and we may explain in more detail later. We also make reference to some timely issues, including Timothee Chalamet’s summary dismissal of opera (and ballet). Take that, Mr. Chalamet!
All we ask is that you listen and enjoy, and then start adding your comments and questions so we can know if what we’re doing is appealing to anyone. And if it’s making you want to attend the opera, all the more reason to comment below. Thank you!
