Essay · Opera · 15 May 2025
It all started with Kirsten Flagstad
A year ago I had never heard or seen an opera, and thought it was completely uninteresting. How did that change? The funny thing is that I can trace it pretty exactly.
Written 15 May 2025 · "a year ago" means May 2024 · a letter, November 2025
A year ago I had never heard or seen an opera, and thought it was completely uninteresting. Now I've seen quite a few on recordings, and been to the opera in Copenhagen with my son, and several times in Oslo. How did that change?
The funny thing is that I can trace it pretty exactly, to the Kirsten Flagstad museum, a recording of The Barber of Seville, a book, ... and then we go deep down into Tristan and Isolde, Wagner, Middle High German, Old Norse, and Bendik og Årolilja.
It turns out that it actually started exactly a year ago, at the Kirsten Flagstad festival! Before that I had never heard an opera, and since then... It's been one thing right after the other!
From Rabbit Holes · Tristan and Isolde · 15 May 2025
On 10 September I was sitting scrolling on YouTube, and happened to come across a recording of Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) from the Stockholm Opera. I was a bit curious, and started watching. The opening music was catchy and great, visually it was very exciting, and the first number with "Piano, piano" was really funny, with wonderful visual comedy… I thought: "Is this opera? I thought opera was just women singing aaaahahaaa".
I didn't finish the opera that day, but watched bits of it over a number of days, and started listening to the music I "already knew" in the car. When I had finished it, I watched it once more with my son, while I translated simultaneously. I also thought it was fun to jump between different productions of the same opera – I've found out that unlike theater, there are a lot of full-length recordings of opera productions, and often in good quality.
This was really the starting shot for my interest, and since then I've seen a lot of operas on screen, have been to the opera in Oslo several times, and took my son to The Barber of Seville in a totally great production in Copenhagen (in a cool "silent film" style).
Read the whole thing: Tristan and Isolde — from Wagner to Old German, via Old Norse →
The book
In October 2024 I read a fantastic book that I have to recommend: Stemmen, by Ingeborg Solbrekken. I did grow up in Hamar of course, and had heard about Kirsten Flagstad, but never really knew much about it. Just lately I had started getting interested in opera and Wagner, so I picked this up when I stopped by the library. (My interest was also sparked by a great talk during the Flagstad days.)
True, Kirsten only lived in Hamar for the first couple of years of her childhood, but the family on both sides came from Hamar and the surrounding area, and the house that's now a museum was actually one of the very first houses in Hamar. Then you learn a ton about growing up in Oslo in a musical family, life with private theaters and opera houses scraping by, in detail about the development of a singer (incredible how "physical" it is)... Then the huge success in America — it's just enormous how popular she apparently was, thirty minutes of applause, a live radio broadcast of a concert with ten million listeners, etc.
Through the book I also got to know a lot of opera history, Wagner specifically, and many exciting Norwegian composers that I want to look into more. The first one I happened to look up on Wikipedia was Arne Dørumsgaard, and what a fascinating man! I would really love to read a biography of him — he built up one of the world's largest collections of music recordings, published 25 volumes of translations of Asian poetry, etc...
Reading a book by Arne Dørumsgaard, a Norwegian composer who translated lots of Chinese poems while living in Italy. He writes about the method of translation of these poems which are extremely sparse... very fascinating how he compares different poetic recreations of Li Bai.
8 October 2024 · @houshuang
The recording
Like the opening to the Barber in Sevilla, which I just watched two versions of (Swedish and Italian), whereas I've seen others where I cannot catch a single word and it just sounds like "aa-a-a-a-aaaa". (Is there a term for this?)
10 September 2024 · @houshuang
I'm pretty new to opera — I guess I heard my very first opera only a few months ago (Barber of Seville, in a great version by Stockholm opera). I've also watched this one with my 10-year-old son, who thought the plot and the clowning were enough to follow along with interest for three hours! Since then I've seen a lot of opera on recordings, through Arte, Operavision, and Met Opera...
And similarly I now really want to attend opera in person, something I wouldn't have dreamt of a few weeks ago...
2 October 2024 · @houshuang
I also find opera really nice - even though I usually don't finish one in a single sitting, it's an aide to really focus on music for an hour or more - and afterwards I really enjoy listening to snippets of the same music in the car etc.
13 October 2024 · @houshuang
From a letter to the culture editor at Morgenbladet, November 2025
In the hall
There was a fantastic opera pub at Jacobs Vinbar in November 2024. So many people, and totally fantastic music. I actually saw Don Giovanni by Mozart on Met Opera in a great performance, and it was fun to hear one of the arias from this opera again there — it's something completely different to hear an aria when you know the plot and understand the content.
Even the ten-year-old I brought along thought it was nice and made it through, long past bedtime (though he did comment that he preferred to "see opera, not just hear it" 😉 And you can understand that. I'm very new to opera and classical music myself and learn a ton every day.
I got interested in opera through recordings, and have taken my wife to Othello in Oslo and my son to The Barber of Seville in Copenhagen. Wouldn't have spent that money if I wasn't sure I liked it. Wouldn't have gotten as much out of it if I hadn't learned and had references from watching different versions of the same opera, and lots of other operas...
How many of the most played operas have you seen? I've seen 5. I was not a big fan of Rigoletto, maybe it was just a poor performance (although setting, at Herodes Atticus in Athens, was spectacular). Love Barber of Seville, Marriage of Figaro, Tosca, Magic Flute, Don Giovanni.
22 September 2025 · @houshuang
It's kind of funny that I could actually pin it down to the exact date. And it all started with Kirsten Flagstad.
Rabbit HolesTristan and Isolde - from Wagner to Old German, via Old NorseOpera, medieval romance, children's book and Norwegian folk song: from Wagner to Old German, via Old Norse.
The ListBooks that aren't at the front of the shelfThe operas we've seen, on The List
The ArgumentBring back FjernsynsteateretWhy recordings don't compete with the theater