When I was a kid, my parents dragged me to innumerable museums, art galleries, and concert halls, hoping I would develop an appreciation for the arts. I didn’t. Paintings, sculpture, classical music—nothing moved me. And the worst? Opera. To me, it just seemed silly, and it had no chance against the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath. I’m not sure why my parents never threw in the towel; maybe they figured I would eventually come around. But I remained adamant. Opera and I had nothing in common.

My opera antipathy remained unchallenged until my junior year in college. My roommate was a music major, and he loved opera. It became his mission to make me love it, too, but like my parents, he failed miserably. For one thing, his interest was twentieth century opera, which featured works like Wozzeck, The Makropulos Affair, and Dialogues of the Carmelites. Take a minute and listen to any portion of these operas and tell me if you think they are an effective way to bring neophytes into the fold. In my case, they had exactly the opposite effect.

My low point with opera came later that year when my roommate asked me to be in a summer stock production of La Bohème he was directing on Long Island. I couldn’t sing, but I could be an extra—a small, non-singing role for crowd scenes. I was to play a Parisian street hawker, and the props person gave me a bird cage to carry around the stage; inside the cage, they had glued a stuffed parrot on the perch. Fast forward to opening night, and there I was, wandering the streets of Paris, trying to sell the bird. Suddenly, the perch rotated, and the parrot shifted upside down. A second later, it dropped to the bottom of the cage, and the audience responded with uproarious laughter and applause. The show went on, as it must, but I was utterly humiliated. As the curtain mercifully dropped on our final performance, I vowed to never have anything to do with opera ever again.

In the wake of that travesty, my opera moratorium lasted two decades. Then something happened. I was at Pingry, and a former student invited me to a performance of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. I said yes, but as the performance neared, I read up on the opera; I was troubled by what I found. Wagner was a notorious antisemite, and his operas, especially Meistersinger, became a big hit with the Nazis. The opera lasted five hours (almost twice as long as the film Lawrence of Arabia), in German, and, as far as I could tell, the main plot was about a singing contest. The more I thought about it, the less I liked. My upcoming night at the Met looked increasingly like yet another inglorious chapter in my sad opera saga.

The evening of the performance could not have been further from my lowly expectations; in fact, it was just the opposite. My former student and his mom were real aficionados—they loved opera, and they knew all sorts of fascinating details about the music, the composer, the time period, and the Met. Most importantly, they somehow managed to spark my curiosity—the way that someone’s passion for something can sometimes inspire it in others. Thanks to our conversations throughout the evening, my whole orientation to the music began to change, to deepen. And while I won’t say that I was humming tunes from the show on the ride back to New Jersey, my time spent with Wagner and two of his devoted fans utterly reversed the long tragic line of my opera arc. To this day, that night remains one of my fondest memories.

I wish I could say that a love for opera blossomed within me in the years that followed that magical evening. Not really, although I do have a few arias in my Spotify collection, and the overture of Die Meistersinger, too. I would also love to report that the general state of opera in our culture is in good shape but, as anyone knows who follows classical music, opera suffers from a fiercely loyal but dwindling fan base. My father-in-law, another opera buff and long-standing season ticket holder at the Met, once told me, ruefully, that at 82, he thought he was the youngest member in the audience. Opera may be fading from the landscape—I seriously doubt it’s a big hit on TikTok—and in some sense, I see a similar endangerment within my own field, literature, as every year students find the likes of Shakespeare, Austen, and Kafka increasingly inaccessible. But as an English teacher, I take heart. I know that if I can still inspire my classes the way a former student and his mom inspired me, the books I love (and maybe some of the music) might just survive for another generation.

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Author photo by Anthony "Truncs" Truncale '26

To contact the author: Mr. Keating