I wish I was a bigger opera fan. But, probably because I don’t see or listen to enough of it, I get easily bored. Operas can be so long, you know.

I am thinking about this because I am reading about the opening of La Scala’s season, in Milan, on December 7. Apparently,  La Scala always opens on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day be damned.

…….You know, I think I overstated my case in the opening paragraph. Maybe, in fact, I like opera more than I think I do. The opera opening the season in Milan is Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. This is one of my favorite operas. I hear the name, and its most well-known music rushes through me. And, there are other Verdi operas I like as much. Rigoletto for one. And others.

This takes me back to the early 1960s, when I probably would have started a blog just like I started this one (the word “blog” was yet to be invented). I had decided, in my college years, that I didn’t like opera enough and that it was probably because I wasn’t familiar enough with it. So, one summer I decided to volunteer with the St. Louis summer opera theater, which was I think then in its second or third year, putting on three operas outdoors on the Washington University campus. I was sort of a gofer and I was there volunteering most days.

The operas were Rigoletto, Cosi fan Tutte, and the Tales of Hoffmann. By the time the summer was over, I knew those three inside and out. I still enjoy them and know much of the music.

And there are other operas I am pretty familiar with. The Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni, Aida, etc. The usuals. There are others that I have enjoyed even though I can’t say that I “know” them. For example, Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. And I have sat through Wagner’s Ring Cycle, pretending to myself that I was having a good time.

But the fact is….I do not seek out opera. I do listen to a fair amount of music. But I almost never select opera. Operas are so long, as I have said.

Yet, I would like to see La Scala.

Reading about the opening in todays Times, I learned that the gala opening is accompanied by a lot of outside protests – again, the usual. The Italian government is too supportive of Israel. Russian soprano Anna Netrebko is too close to Putin. And so on.

But there is one protest subject that was new to me. The fate of Verdi’s home at Sant’agata.

I don’t know the full story. Verdi lived here much of his adult life. It is located near his place of birth. For years, some Verdi heirs lived in much of the house, but the portions of the first floor where Verdi and his wife lived were open to the public as a museum. Something then happened, arguments between his descendants, etc., and the government is in the process of obtaining possession. In the meantime,  the museum is closed, and the building is disintegrating. When the Italian bureaucracy will allow title to transfer, how repairs will be funded, and when the museum will reopen, no one knows.