Ask first-year student Alexandra Kagan anything about opera. Anything.
Kagan was a regional finalist last April in the Texaco Opera Quiz's
first-ever contest for high school students. The popular event is an
intermission feature of the live radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera.
While panelists are usually critics, performers, conductors, or playwrights, 57
students from eighteen schools competed to be one of the three quiz finalists.
Kagan, a graduate of the Gunnery, a private school in Washington, Conn., was
a New York region finalist, but did not win the final round to participate in
the quiz on the radio — a fact that doesn't bother her at all.
“I am not the most outgoing of people, so the opportunity to be heard by
millions of people internationally was a little nerve-wracking,” she says.
Kagan was introduced to opera by Tom Adolphson, a humanities teacher at the
Gunnery whose passion for music inspired her. “He just started throwing on
different CDs and recordings. Then we went down to the Metropolitan Opera House
in Manhattan. I just fell in love with it,” she says.
When Adolphson said that he needed three students to take on an extra course
load to compete in the opera quiz last spring, Kagan agreed — and immersed
herself in opera for several months, spending three hours each evening studying
operas and composers.
“I had a lot of fun with it,” she says. “I was in shock that I
knew most of the answers. I didn't think that I had done enough to
prepare.” She lost to another student who had studied opera his whole life
and was fluent in Italian.
Kagan is studying psychology and European history — something she fell in
love with while researching operas.
As for continuing with opera, she plans to be a lifelong opera-goer. “I
haven't found one yet that I didn't like,” she says.