Alexandra Kagan is an eighteen-year-old opera whiz. A Texaco Quiz Kid, to be exact.
Kagan, one of 562 members of the Class of 2004, was a regional finalist last April in the Texaco Opera Quiz's first-ever quiz contest for high school students. The popular Texaco Opera Quiz is an intermission feature of the live radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. While panelists are often critics, performers, conductors, or playwrights, fifty-seven 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. She admits that she was “petrified” of going on the radio. “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 who used music and his own enthusiasm to motivate his students. “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 to do it — and immersed herself in opera for several months. She spent three hours each evening studying operas and composers to prepare.
But regardless of all the preparation, the quiz was intimidating.
“I came from a very small boarding school with half a year of coursework and a little bit of opera here and there. I wasn't as prepared as kids who had been studying their whole lives,” she says. “I don't speak one ounce of Italian, so going head-to-head against students from schools where they had four years of opera and Italian was a bit of a shock for me.”
Yet Kagan did remarkably well. “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.
In her first term at Union, Kagan is studying psychology and European history — something she fell in love with when researching the settings for many of the operas she studied.
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.