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.

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Full episode page for Andrea Chénier on Decanonized.com.

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