Welcome to Decanonized! An opera podcast where the sacred is subjective. Every other week, I’ll be joined by a guest to go through one of the 100 “greatest” operas as laid out in Henry W. Simon’s iconic book, 100 Great Operas and Their Stories to ask the very simple, always complicated question: Is it actually great?
Mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz helps me kick off Decanonized with a discussion of what many consider to be the greatest opera. Topics include fate, othering, hating cops, whether Carmen really has to die, and why Don José would make the worst camping partner, and the dream blunt rotation of Alexander Chee, Tank Girl, and Susan McClary.
There’s also a full show notes page for Bizet’s Carmen, including a playlist, recommended recordings and reading, and a synopsis that doesn’t suck.
For this episode, Nika and happened to be in Berlin at the same time, so we saw Carmen live in an organ trafficking-coded production by Ole Anders Tandberg at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. So, bonus digressions on kidney harvesting and bull testicles!
I’m testing out sharing these episodes on Substack as well as on the normal podcatchers of choice (including Patreon and YouTube). I won’t email you all with each new episode, but I’ll stick the links into whatever my next email is, and some of them may be related to an episode that I didn’t get to go deep enough into on the show!
But if you’d rather get more consistent Decanonized updates, please let me know. I’m trying to figure out how to do this in a way that doesn’t overburden anyone’s inboxes, and I realize the last thing anyone needed in 2026 was a new podcast. xo
