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

[lady_songsmith]

On the other hand, it seems that at various points in wizarding history they have been more integrated in Muggle society. We know that Slytherin wasn't keen on Muggleborns attending Hogwarts, so the isolationist tendencies go pretty far back, but we also have grandfather clocks and pocketwatches, wireless radios, trains... What Muggle time-period does the description of Diagon Alley evoke? Or other wizarding locales we've seen? So it's entirely possible that wizards have been exposed to and enjoy opera, chamber music, and the like.

Whether the wizarding world can support opera houses is debatable. On the one hand, if Hogsmeade is the only all-wizarding village in Britain, and it's pretty small, there's an argument to be made that there isn't a critical mass. On the other hand, wizards do live in mixed-locales, and can hide their own establishments in along with the Muggle buildings. (Leaky Cauldron, MoM) And from the World Cup, presumably the actual wizarding population is fairly large.

[pen-and-umbra.livejournal.com]

So it's entirely possible that wizards have been exposed to and enjoy opera, chamber music, and the like.

We know from canon that wizards enjoy chamber music (Dumbledore) and opera (Nicholas Flamel). Presumably, because there is no "wizard" prefix to them, they are the Muggle versions. That was not the question here.

And from the World Cup, presumably the actual wizarding population is fairly large.

The Quidditch World Cup was actually one of the arguments I made when speaking on behalf of a wizarding opera. As an analogy from Muggle world, Helsinki can draw 40,000 people to watch the hockey world cup finals and we have an opera house; hence, if the wizarding society as an aggregate can draw 40,000 people to watch the QWC, they could support an opera house.

So I'm totally buying that wizards have the necessary critical mass to support an opera company. The contention was, if the art form never gets off the ground, there's no point in saying that there are enough wizards to support it. If the tradition isn't there, it isn't there.