How to get hooked on opera

is a senior research fellow in music and history at Jesus College, University of Oxford, and holds a research residency at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She is the author of The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (2007), Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (2019) and Puccini’s La bohème (2021), and the editor of Puccini in Context (2023).

People often feel intimidated by opera, assuming it to be either socially exclusive, pretentious or intellectually complicated. But at the simplest level, operas are just great stories set to music.

There was no opera on my radar when I was growing up, but I did enjoy being taken to see Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. As I would later discover, these entertaining works not only made fun of the social mores of Victorian England but parodied the operatic music that was so popular among people of all backgrounds at that time. I also liked performing in school musicals, such as The King and I and My Fair Lady, and watching shows like West Side Story. I was starting to think about what music adds to a work of theatre in terms of atmosphere and characterisation.

I eventually heard my first opera – Puccini’s Tosca – on a school trip as a teenager. I was already keen on drama and this seemed like drama on steroids. Although I didn’t understand everything, I could tell it was an exciting story, with passionate music sung by people whose lives seemed to depend on it. The following year we were taken to see Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and that was enjoyable in a different way – funny and entertaining. Just like Gilbert and Sullivan, comic opera was a type of musical theatre that had its conventions, and the similarities started to make sense.

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