This episode really took its emotional toll. In episode 2.5 (our hosts explain in the podcast why the odd numbering), we go all in on Violetta, the lead character featured in Verdi’s La Traviata. Until now we’ve contented ourselves with understanding how opera arrived at the point in 1853 when Verdi could produce this masterwork, and we went deep into the real-life events and characters that inspired it.
Now it’s time to understand the power of this single role, both the mechanics of what it takes to sing Violetta and the history of some of the most famous Violettas of opera days past — including Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba, then taking time to savor the career of Maria Callas. It all leads us to this month, when American soprano Lisette Oropesa will take the stage at the Met to perform this iconic role in a way that is thoroughly her own. These are all superlative women, literally — one the highest paid singer in history and another the most famous classical singer of all time. That’s fitting that such women give body to the voice of Violetta, also a superlative role in the history of opera. You’ll get chills, we can nearly promise it.
We get endless variety offered in response to whatever we click on once. But if we never make that first click, we’ll never even know that there’s a world behind it worth exploring. This experience is us clicking on opera.
A reminder that we’re doing this whole series of episodes to get ourself informed enough, and by now even jazzed, to attend our first opera at the Met, where, on March 28th, not even a dozen days from now, we will hear Oropesa sing “Amami, Alfredo” and we and hundreds of others will be shaken to the core.
We’re not big opera people. In this regard we’re probably the public that Timothee Chalamet had in mind when he recently suggested both the opera and the ballet are on life support. As a media scholar (James got his Ph.D. in Mass Communication at Syracuse), it’s easy to diagnose why opera, along with most traditional live theater experiences, were so replaceable in a mass media environment, when it became exceedingly cheap to film something once, replay it on movie screens a thousand times, or to broadcast something once to an eventual audience of millions.
But now we’ve entered an era of personal media, where everybody lives in a bubble of their own curation, aided and abetted by algorithms designed to feed them more of the same thing. We get endless variety offered in response to whatever we click on once. But if we never make that first click, we’ll never even know that there’s a world behind it worth exploring.
This experience is us clicking on opera. It doesn’t mean we’ll be Met patrons for life. But there’s no harm in exploring what opera could have been saying to us all this time. So far we’re discovering a vast treasure of cultural richness that has been hiding in plain sight. Listen to this episode if you need even the slightest evidence of that. What these sopranos have accomplished over 125 years of interpreting this amazing work is moving to the core. We may never become opera followers, but we will forever be changed.
Thank you for listening. If you enjoy, please let us know; and share this if can. Somebody out there needs to hear Patti, Melba, Callas, and, most especially today, Oropesa and feel their heart sink and soar at the same time.
