Just a little Snape musing...

[valis2]

rickfan37 did her own build-a-snape here and mentioned this really excellent point:

Here’s the Urbane!Snape myth again. I don’t know, and we’re given no clue in canon. I simply don’t believe he’s a closet opera buff and spends his spare time humming along to great arias, or that he can quote Dante or Shakespeare at will.

It really made me think of something new. I've always been a bit apprehensive about fics where Snape quotes Byron and listens to Bach.

I think what really is happening is that giving Snape these "pretentious" hobbies is a way for an inexperienced writer to "shorthand" their characterization of him, because in just a sentence of quoting/playing classical music, they set him up (in their minds) as a certain sort of character, aloof, mysterious, educated, etc. It's a short-cut.

The thing is, the sort of character they're trying to develop is not canon. Snape is a pure-blood, and would most likely know very little, if anything, about the Muggle world (his matchbox comment notwithstanding). And I'm certain that most pure-bloods wouldn't want to involve themselves in any sort of Muggle-world scrutiny.

So authors who attempt this short-cut are really doing canon a disservice, when what they really need to do is discover what would make him an aloof, mysterious, and educated character in Rowling's world.

Just my little musing for the moment.

Comments

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

Part of why smaller cities have opera companies is that they would get the big work from Vienna or Berlin after it was debuted in the big house. (And the limited resources of these companies becomes an increasing problem in the 19th century and into the 20th; Rossini complains about poor treatments of his works and so does R. Strauss). But the works were only done in the first place because of the big centers, which could provide the financial and material (sets, dancers, musicians, etc.) to put on the work enough that it could be financially profitable. One of the main ways that operas were spread out into the countryside was not through actual performance, but through piano reductions and arrangements of the big tunes.

Some kinds of opera travel better than others, as well. Italy has several major theatres but no one dominant center, and Italian opera tends to be singer-oriented; the singers would travel in a company, using the same costumes for any number of roles. This traveling also fueled the intense drive for 'new' works, which is why there are so many reworkings/pastiche in the 18th/early 19th century rep. French opera does not travel until the 19th century, when it becomes the biggest thing in London; only because there are impresarios with a lot of money to lure across the singers and shill out for the decor. Opera is an institutional art even more dependent on fixed places than the theatre, and that's what the WW seems to lack.