Opera with a ten-year-old

Tweets from @houshuang, in date order · links and handles removed, sentences that ran across two tweets joined, nothing else changed

4 October 2024

Comparing opera (or theater) performances is so fascinating. Norway and Sweden's national operas should be quite comparative in terms of culture, funding etc... But while the singing of this Norwegian Barber of Seville is great, the staging is so bland!

I also watched some other versions with even more "traditional" staging, but at least they're having fun, going all out, in the name of "opera"... I watched it with my 10 year old (his first opera), and he loved it.

11 October 2024

I know people are always making up what their kids say, but my 10 year old literally said today "We have to hurry home so we can finish the rest of the opera". (Figaro's Wedding from the Met, after we watched The Barber in Seville two weeks ago). Pretty cool that he's into it!

13 April 2025

I hate that the fake "you won't believe what my kid just said" has polluted the well, because I want to share the stuff my kid says, but nobody will believe me :)

Literally: "If I fold the clothes quickly, can we finish watching the opera tonight?"... 10 year old boy.

22 April 2025

Kid (10): Dad, can we watch an opera before I go to bed? Sure.

I asked Grok for some child-friendly operas a while back, since he had seen Barber of Seville (we later watched it together at a real opera house) and Figaro's Wedding. We already watched the Magic Flute, it's first suggestion (which was great), and now we were going to try Donizetti's Love Elisir. There were a few productions on Met Opera, but we settled for the newest one (there was an older one with Pavarotti, but he liked the staging on the more modern ones).

The staging was really gorgeous, the actors wonderful, the music beautiful. I thought a lot about how people complain that movies these days are all so dark and devoid of color - they should try this! And people complaining about fast paced cutting - this is so wonderfully slow, but never boring! It's so cozy watching this cuddled up together. I'm translating live from the English subtitles (although in this one I could follow most of the Italian as well), given that they don't sing that fast, and repeat a lot, that's no problem. And probably good practice for my brain. There are great references, they're actually reading the story of Tristan and Isolde (I didn't know the plot), which we've read in Rosemary Sutcliffe's version (and I'm watching the Wagner version when he goes to bed!)... then comes the snooty sergeant saying he's handing her a rose like Paris handed out an apple, and I pause and explain the precursor to the Trojan war, since he has read the Odyssey (children's version). So fun to build on these references together (three years ago I knew none of them myself! I didn't grow up in household with classical culture, although I was a big reader).

Then we go upstairs, he has some yoghurt, and I continue translating the story from the German Donald Duck pocket he has somehow found.

Such a nice time together!

If you haven't tried watching opera with your kids together, give it a try! They will love the colorful staging, the music, the exuberance. And gradually you can dig down into so many layers of history... And comparing different stagings of the same opera is really interesting!

25 April 2025

I have previously read a version of the story for my son as part of a Rosemary Sutcliffe story, and funnily enough, when we began watching "L'elisir d'amore" together last night (whose story I didn't know), the story of Tristan and Isolde turned out to be a major plot device!