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Hi everyone. I'm Rincey and I am one of the contributing editors over at Book Riot. Today
let's talk about the opera. Now I am someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with
opera. Unless you count the fact that I saw the MTV adaptation of Carmen that starred
Beyonce back in the early 2000s, I hadn't experienced opera really at all. Now I played
violin growing up and I was part of orchestra and things like that, so I had experience
with classical music and that was something I was comfortable with. And sometimes when
I'm listening to the classical music stations on like Pandora or Spotify or something, you
know, an occasional song from an opera will come on and I'll listen to it. But actually
like watching a full opera, Ihad never really done that until earlier this year. I went
and I saw an adaptation of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, which I had actually talked about
earlier this year on this channel. I had read Bel Canto when I was in college and then I
re-read it before seeing the adaptation. And I had a pretty decent experience with it.
And then I just recently finished reading The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee,
which has obviously been all the rage in the literary world this year. And it got me thinking
again about the idea of books and operas. I feel like it's something that feels like
it should be connected, but isn't connected very often. I'm not sure if it's because operas
are seen as being "less popular" or more of a like "elitist" sort of thing to be doing.
And like books are supposedly more accessible. You could make arguments about how all of
those statements I made are false. But I feel like books and operas are something that sort
of fit well together, just because obviously an opera is telling a type of story and books
are objects that tell stories. So I'm really surprised at the fact that I had a really
hard time even finding other books that had to deal with operas. Obviously there are ones
like Phantom of the Opera, which is like a huge, popular musical now. And movie -- actually
I don't know if the movie's considered that popular, but anyways. But it just made me
think a lot about how the idea of the opera and books are very similar. They have this
specific storytelling style and obviously the opera is trying to accomplish something
different than a book. It goes about it in a very different way, the way that TV goes
about it in a different way and movies go about it in a different way. But I'm really
surprised that there aren't more books either about opera singers or like based around an
opera itself because it feels like operas in general are like meant to be these sort
of like dramatized or over dramatic or really high intensity sort of situations. And it
feels like all of that passion and drama and conflict should go really well with the book.
And yet you don't really see people tackling opera very often when it comes to novels and
stories. Now that might just be because of the fact that writers aren't familiar enough
with operas that they don't feel comfortable writing about it. Alexander Chee in this book
has clearly done a lot of research and was very knowledgeable about operas because he
had so much detail in here. And so maybe a lot of people are intimidated by that level
of commitment into knowing about something that maybe they don't think would be very
interesting. But I feel like it's sort of this potential that's out there for writers
and authors to take part in that they aren't really exploring very much and I just thought
that was really interesting. I don't know if anyone else has experienced this or has
realized this or has thought about this at all. Or it's entirely possible that there
are a bunch of books out there about operas. And I don't mean like non-fiction books that
talk about operas but I mean sort of like these fictionalized stories like Queen of
the Night or Bel Canto that have these fictional stories that they're telling but they use
opera as either a device or setting or way of telling a specific kind of story. Because
you can definitely tell, especially with Queen of the Night, that Alexander Chee not only
uses opera in the story but the way that he structured the story and things like that,
the opera all was influencing the book very heavily. So let me know what you guys think.
Am I just completely insane? Are there a bunch of opera books out there and I just haven't
noticed it before. Or if you're someone who has experience with opera, what do you think
about this? Do you think that there should be more of a tie in between books and opera?
Or do you feel like that they are just really difficult to sort of blend together and that's
why a lot of writers don't attempt it. So yeah, that's all I have for this week and
I will see you guys next week. Bye.