I built an opera guide to stop pretending I knew what was happening

I went to see Rigoletto a few years ago and spent the entire first act confidently lost. I knew it was Verdi, I knew it was tragic, and I knew the La donna è mobile melody because it's in every pizza commercial. That was the extent of it.

During the interval I opened Wikipedia on my phone. The plot summary was three paragraphs of character names I'd already forgotten, written with the emotional tone of a property deed. I came back for the second act knowing approximately the same amount as before.

This bothered me for longer than it should have. Not because I couldn't follow the opera — you can follow the drama without understanding the words — but because I knew there was more there, and I was missing it. The hunchbacked jester protecting a daughter nobody knew he had. The duke singing cheerfully about women's fickleness while that same daughter is dying offstage because of him. It's a devastating construction once you know the shape of it.

So I built a guide. It runs at opera-lirica.statichost.page, it's in Italian and English, and it covers about twenty operas across Verdi, Mozart, Puccini, Donizetti, Wagner, Strauss, and a few others. Vue 3 in my playground repo. Straightforward.

The code took a weekend. The writing took considerably longer, which is not a sentence I expected to type about a side project.

The problem with opera guides is that they tend to split into two useless extremes: the synopsis (plot summary with no context, no feeling, no reason to care) and the musicological analysis (for people who already care deeply and don't need to be convinced). What I wanted was something in between — a guide that assumed no prior knowledge but also assumed you were an adult with functioning taste.

That meant being opinionated. The character descriptions on the site are not neutral. The Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto is described as "the attractive villain" — charming, wealthy, cheerful, never facing consequences for anything. That's what makes him interesting and what makes the finale hit. You can't get there by listing his vocal register and the arias he sings.

The Verdi page has a line about how his characters "burn": fathers losing daughters, women dying for honour, heroes destroyed by jealousy. It's the kind of thing a music critic would cut for being imprecise and an encyclopedia would never write for being too subjective. I kept it because it's true and because it tells you something in five words that a plot summary in five paragraphs doesn't.

Some specific things I didn't know before writing these pages: Verdi kept La donna è mobile secret from the cast and orchestra until the final rehearsal before the Venice premiere in 1851, because he knew it would be all over the city within hours if anyone heard it before opening night. He was right. By the following morning people were singing it in the streets. Wagner didn't call his works "operas" — he called them Gesamtkunstwerk, total art works, and considered the word "opera" an insult to what he was doing. Whether you agree with him or not depends mostly on how you feel about five-hour musical dramas about Norse gods.

The site is genuinely used. I open it before performances on my phone, or sometimes in the interval when I want to check which character just died and why. It's also the only project I've built where the question "does it work?" is answered by whether I enjoyed the opera more than last time.

I think I did.