Episode 010: Andrea Chénier with Carmen Paddock
It’s all fun and games until the guillotine gets weird. In honor of Bastille Day, critic Carmen Paddock joins us to talk about Umberto Giordano’s verismo (?) opera about a poet who negs a debutante at a party, and her subsequent ability to take ride-or-die to new extremes during the French Revolution. We also discuss the real hero or Andrea Chénier, who is (as in so many operas) actually the baritone.
Additional topics include: sopranos melting down on Instagram, John McWhorter melting down over John Cage, and Charlotte Corday melting down over Jean-Paul Marat.
Simon says:
“Andrea Chénier was Giordano’s fourth operatic score. He composed it while still a comparatively obscure young man of twenty-seven, seated in a warehouse in Milan full of gravestones and other funeral statuary. (I mention this as an odd fact of no particular significance.)”
Andrea Chénier: The story
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