Welcome to Opera Rat: The Blog.
Why are you here?
Probably because you love opera, and you love it the way I do - enough not only to watch and listen to it, but also to dream and read and surf and tweet about it. So it's likely we have something special in common.
Why am I here?
Because I believe opera can save the world. No, really.
My love of opera has made me a happier, kinder, and more sensitive person. The world could use some happier, kinder and more sensitive people. So I'm using my only marketable skill - writing - to infect as much of the world as I can with the same love of opera that has so improved my life.
This blog, and my @OperaRat feed on Twitter, and my writing about opera in more traditional media are all intended to serve that simple mission. Even when I'm critical of opera - which isn't unusual - my intent is to help improve the art form and make it accessible to the widest audience possible: old and young, wealthy and humble, aficionados and rookies, snobs and Philistines, all alike.
Finally: Why opera? Why not the symphony, or the theater, or cooking, or baseball, or the Green Bay Packers (other things I love)?
Opera has a special power, deriving from its alchemical blend of drama and music. No other form of art or entertainment can match the thrill opera offers when it's done right. No other form of art or entertainment elicits tears and laughter and astonishment and plain old chills the way opera can.
Not that it always does. Opera needs some help right now, and that's another reason I'm here. But when opera works, it delights the brain, softens the heart and improves the soul like nothing else in our increasingly impersonal and technical world. Let's spread it around, together.
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