You Probably Shouldn’t Follow My Blog If…

1. You despise music, especially classical music.On the other hand, if you love classical music but have thus far found opera to be a bit off-putting or intimidating, stick around. In the coming months I plan to tee up for you some lovely classical music experiences folded into the theatrical storytelling of opera. In fact, it was a desire to get more out of concert music that first drew me to opera. I don’t have the best ear for music, and I can get lost in a lengthy symphony. Opera, with its storyline, its drama, its visual spectacle—and yes, with it’s words—gave me access to classical music on a deeper level than I’d ever experienced before.
   

   “Donald and I don’t see eye to eye on much at all, but I can tell you this for sure: we agree 100% that Tim Tibbitts is the most dangerous opera blogger in America today.”

   –Hillary Clinton, What Happened

2. You despise choral music, have never felt moved by high church music or religious music of an sort, and hearing the Hallelujah chorus of Handel’s Messiah every Christmas season makes you cringe.On the other hand, if you love choral music, get a little weak-kneed when a church organ starts up, or have always felt that Handel’s Messiah scratched the Christmas itch better than any jingly carol ever could, stick around. As an admittedly controversial recent study reported in Musical Pharmacology Today found, “Handel’s Messiah is the number one “musical gateway drug” into the realm of opera.
3. You hated Les Mis, refused to see Rent, and would rather stay home and needlepoint with your cat than attend your kid’s high school musical.On the other hand, if you know all the words to “I Dreamed a Dream,” and “525,600 minutes” is exactly how you measure a year, don’t trade in your tickets to the Broadway series, but stick around—you might be more at risk of becoming an opera fan than you realize.
4. You’ve always felt Shakespeare was overrated and the classical Greek tragedies a bore.You see where this is going, right? Shakespeare’s plays have provided inspiration for more than 200 operas over the centuries, including Verdi’s amazing takes on Macbeth, Falstaff, and Otello; more recently, the contemporary composer Thomas Adès brought new life to The Tempest in opera form. There’s nothing Shakespeare-inspired in the region or on HD for this spring, but in April The Opera Evangelist will guide you through a pair of trips to the underworld with two different operatic explorations of the Orpheus myth (Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice at Opera Columbus and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at Apollo’s Fire in Cleveland).
5. You are an opera fanatic and regularly attend live opera in your area, and you never—literally never—feel frustrated in your efforts to convince your otherwise intelligent, thoughtful, and cultured friends and family members to come along with you sometime to see what they’re missing.On the other hand, if the response of a full 98% of your friends and family is a resounding “No!” accompanied by a look that indicates your good sense is being questioned, then this blog might be for you. The Opera Evangelist will be here every Tuesday morning to offer useful introductions and thoughtful content related to every single Met in HD production this season, as well as a number of wonderful live opera experiences in Cleveland, Columbus and Pittsburgh throughout the winter and spring. I hope you’ll find something in upcoming posts to help you communicate your love of opera to others and to entice some friends to tag along.

Don’t miss out. Start following today the opera blogger that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump agree is “the most dangerous opera blogger in America today,” the man Jennifer Anniston calls “the sexiest opera blogger of my generation”—me, Tim Tibbitts, the opera evangelist!

Disclaimer: In the interest of glamourizing the idea of following this blog, today’s post may contain what some people have come to call fake news. Oops.

 

 

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