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

[sophie-spence.livejournal.com]

Show me a village the size of Hogsmeade (pop. surely less than 100,000) that maintains an opera company and I'm sold on the point.

*raises a timid hand*
Our Santa Fe Opera was founded in 1957 and is still going strong in a town with a population of 64,700 (2004 est). SFO has a first-class reputation and an amazing Opera House (http://www.santafeopera.org/). The season is short, however, about eight weeks every summer, five operas a season, and many of the audience members come to Santa Fe from Elsewhere for the season - so perhaps this doesn't meet your criteria?

[pen-and-umbra.livejournal.com]

Sure -- there's an opera house and opera is played in it. ;) However, Santa Fe (pop. 64,700) is still a few magnitudes greater than I would assume from Hogsmeade (pop. a few hundred, maybe a thousand). In the case of New Haven, I'm assuming the relative proximity to big cities is also what eats at their chances of having a resident opera company; hence, Santa Fe as a smaller city has one when New Haven doesn't.

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

No, because Santa Fe is a festival house as opposed to a repertory/regular company. It exists because of a number of factors, the major one being that it pulls most of its spectators from people who are willing and able to travel to see things that they usually wouldn't--the reputation of the Festival was built on its performance of at least one Strauss opera a year, and usually one of the rarer ones. They've moved away from that since Crosby died, but have built up the reputation and the clientele to be able to. [Festivals are a distinctly late 19th/early 20th century phenomena in their founding: Bayreuth, Salzburg, Glyndebourne....]