Live Weekly Workshop
Opera, Actually
One opera. One voice. One hour. Every week. No dress code. No prior knowledge required.
This is not a lecture. It is a conversation about opera, led by someone who grew up inside it and spent years learning how to explain it to people who never had.
If you have ever felt like opera was a locked room everyone else had the key to, this is the door. You do not need a password. You need someone to walk you in. This is where the joy and the fun of opera finally become yours.
How Each Session Works
Every weekly session takes one opera and opens it up from three angles, so you leave actually understanding it, not just having heard about it.
The Opera 20 min
I set up the story and the music. The one aria you need to know, the moment everything turns, why this piece has survived for a hundred years. No textbook language. Just what you need to feel it.
The Insider 20 min
Then I take you backstage. The vocal mechanics behind that big moment, the history nobody tells you, and yes, the gossip. The affairs, the rivalries, the premiere that ended in a riot, the diva who refused to go on. Every great opera has a scandal behind it, and I know them.
Your Questions 20 min
Then it is yours. Live Q&A, ask me anything. This is the part I look forward to most.
A taste of what we might open up
- Why La Traviata got laughed off the stage on opening night.
- The mad scene that ends careers.
- The opera that was banned for twenty years.
- What Carmen was really about, and why audiences were scandalized.
- The role so cursed singers still whisper before performing it.
Why This Works
Why opera makes a surprisingly perfect hobby
It feeds your mind and your emotions, and it fits into a real life. Play it around your kids and it genuinely supports their development. Put it on in the car. Let it run while you do the dishes. You do not have to catch every note. It becomes part of you slowly, on its own.
And once a week, we talk about what it made you feel.
For Singers
You have spent years learning things audiences will never see. Here is a room that actually wants to hear them.
Come as a guest. Talk about a role that nearly broke you and how you survived it. The passage everyone fears and what you do with it. The night everything went wrong. The thing you wish someone had told you at 22.
And yes, you can finally tell the story you have been dying to tell at every dinner party. Here it will actually land.
This is not a masterclass. Nobody is grading you. It is a stage of a different kind, one where the work you have quietly perfected finally gets the audience it deserves. Newcomers get to hear how it really works. Younger singers get to ask the questions they have nowhere else to ask.
Not enough performances in the world. Plenty to say. Come say it.
Valery Egudin as Otello, NOVAT Novosibirsk. People's Artist of the USSR. He performed this role for thirty years.
Ready to join?
Book a weekly session below, or apply to come as a guest speaker.
Book a Weekly Session
First Session
$1
Come try it, no risk.
Regular Session
$10
Weekly, live, with Q&A.