About the Show

Decanonized is an opera podcast where the sacred is subjective.

Every other week, host Olivia Giovetti is joined by a guest to reexamine one of the 100 operas collected in Henry W. Simon’s 1957 book, 100 Great Operas and Their Stories. It’s a book that shows up in opera gift shops, on library shelves, and in the homes of people who may or may not remember how they acquired it — like the Gremlins, it tends to multiply whenever someone starts to whistle “La donna è mobile.”

It’s not the only “definitive” list of great operas. But it is one of the longest and most widely circulated. For many listeners over the last 69 years, it’s become a point of reference for what the repertoire is supposed to be. Many of the works Simon breaks down are part of a canon that has become settled, definitive, and beyond question.

But canons are not fixed objects; they’re habits of repetition, familiarity, and reinforcement. This show follows those habits back to their source and asks what happens when you stop taking them for granted.

Each episode focuses on a single work from Simon’s list of the 100 greatest operas and examines it from the inside out, moving between close musical readings and broader contexts: We cover the music, the drama, the cultural baggage, ideological residue, pop-cultural detours, and the occasional hypothetical that no one asked for but everyone now has to consider. And through this, we trace how these works come to feel familiar, canonical, or self-evident in the first place.

Where we leave off is less with a verdict than with a pressure test: What is this opera doing? Why has it lasted? And what does it reveal when you stop treating it as a museum artifact?

Classical music is guided by the idea of canon, but nothing is truly sacred. And that’s a good thing.