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 — a book that, if you’ve ever expressed an interest in opera, you most likely own. (Much like the Gremlins, it tends to multiply when exposed to the melody of “La donna è mobile.”)

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

But canons aren’t fixed objects. What we consider to be canon is more often a habit of repetition and familiarity. This show follows those habits back to their source and asks what happens when we stop taking them for granted.

Each episode of Decanonized focuses on a single work from Simon’s list of the 100 greatest operas, examining it from the inside out while 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 really asked for but everyone now has to consider. And through this, we trace how these works come to feel canonical in the first place.

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