Weep, Shudder, Die: The Secret of Opera Revealed (with Dana Gioia)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

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Summary

How can opera, with words we rarely understand, make us cry? Why does opera, filled with melodrama, move us? Listen as poet and librettist Dana Gioia explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why words matter more than we think, in both opera and on Broadway.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is December 19th, 2024, and my guest is poet and author Dana Joya.
0:42.5	This is Dana's third appearance on Econ Talk.
0:45.3	He was last year in April of 2023, talking about poetry and death.
0:50.4	Our topic for today is his latest book, Weep, Shudder, Die on Opera and Poetry.
0:58.4	Dana, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:00.6	It's good to be seeing you again.
1:03.1	It's great to see you as well.
1:06.2	This book is about two of my favorite things and a few more, opera and poetry, but we have
1:13.3	to be honest, opera and poetry are not the most popular things among most Americans and many
1:20.8	other people around the world.
1:23.8	Why opera?
1:24.8	What's your love of opera, which comes through on most every page of this book?
1:30.8	Well, opera is one of the two or three arts in the world I most love. I mean,
1:36.3	opera and poetry would be my top two, probably followed by novels or movies, but I've loved
1:42.0	opera in a curious and changing way ever since I was a kid.
1:47.3	And now that I'm an older man, I wanted to explore the ways in which I think opera is both loved and
1:58.9	distrusted in culture, that it's not merely appealing, but intoxicating
	...

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