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Growing Up Opera: Do Parents Influence Their Kids’ Interests?
Brainwash your kids to love fine art.
This post originally appeared on The Opera Snob.
After talking to the awesome Opera Teen a while ago, I realized that we had something in common: Neither of us had grown up around opera. Our parents weren’t fans, and we more or less discovered it on our own.
Like me, The Teen had come upon opera largely through self-discovery. He had had a grandfather who had acted as a kind of guide into the world of opera, but his parents just didn’t seem to be into it. And this is a story I’ve heard over and over again from Millennials: Opera just wasn’t part of the entertainment palette at home, so they went out and embraced it as something new. Fine arts, by ways of rebellion.
I can definitely say that was the case for me. My family was definitely not a stereotypical “opera family” — We weren’t rich, we didn’t give money to NPR based on their opera programming, and we lived in a small town (though I did hear my very first opera there, courtesy of this company). When I’d sing particularly loud in the shower, my mum would call out to me, “Stop singing opera!” We were a jazz family by heritage; opera was the polar opposite of us, and therefore foreign.
