It's almost Opera Season!

Hey Cohort, 

I have a shocking secret for you....

wait for it

I love opera.  

I didn't know that I loved opera until about 5 years ago when I bought a friend of mine tickets to see the Met Live in HD performance of Puccini's Manon Lescaut and went with her to see that opera at the theatre in Saskatoon.  I've learned since then that I love Italian and French opera most of all, but I try to go to as many operas as possible. 

When I went to New York in May of 2008, I went to the Met (the backstage tour was the best $15 I spent on that entire trip) and saw Mozart's La Clemenza de Tito from the nosebleedyest of all nosebleed seats and it was still magnificent.  

You're not going to get your grade 5s or 6s to sit through 5 hours of Wagner, but you could probably get them to watch and enjoy this scene from La Fille du Regiment:

For me opera is the perfect blend of music and drama, and I can see it working in a classroom, not every opera mind you or every classroom either, as a way to give context to periods in time.   Many operas tell stories about the time they were written in or about history and I think of them as a way to give cultural context to history, both in general and the history of music and drama in Europe.  It could also be an interesting introduction into a French lesson (as long as it's a French opera). 

For those of you interested, the Met season at the movie theatre here in town starts on Saturday, October 5 with Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin.