I’ve been living with opera since I was fourteen. I trained as a classical vocalist, went to a music conservatory, and was a freelance opera singer for a decade in the United States. Around the same time, I started a small opera company producing shows, and I began writing lyrics and libretti, mostly because I wanted to sing different kinds of characters.

I’ve been knee-deep in the industry for most of my life, even as a child. Later, as paths change, I transitioned more into the research side of things, but I’m still drawn to opera—working conditions, career paths, all the historical baggage. My work as a researcher is framed by my experiences in the industry and driven by a desire to make it more sustainable, to unpack these complexities and try to fix them if we can.

This book is an amalgamation of my experiences. Some parts are almost memoir-esque. I reflect on my own experiences and combine that with original research drawn from data on what companies are programming and why. I also conducted twenty-nine interviews with high-ranking opera insiders. It’s all a combination of that, but with jokes. It’s engaging, funny, irreverent.

There are many books about opera—huge, eight-hundred-page tomes. I have them. I wanted to write something that kicked opera off the pedestal of expectations a bit. The stigma that it’s snobbish, elite, and contained—it’s not. It’s a mess. But if we understand the messiness, we can appreciate it more and be even more in awe that it’s survived for four hundred years and is still alive.

I’m a librettist, so I fully support new works. If you don’t commit to new works, you can’t advance the art form. It’s not just a museum artifact. We see Carmen, Tosca, and La Bohème again and again. Opera has always evolved. It’s only in the last 125 years that it has crystallized around the same works. That’s one of the battlegrounds I talk about—the canon versus new works. How do we have both? Companies need those works to sell tickets.

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