Michael J. Bobbitt: Beautiful Contradictions

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Article Published: 20 Jul 2026

By Michael J. Bobbitt

Opera has always known how to hold contradiction. It can be intimate and enormous. Ancient and experimental. Beautiful and unsettling. It can carry grief in one hand and spectacle in the other. It can ask us to believe in impossible things — gods, ghosts, curses, disguises, resurrections — while also asking us to confront the most human things: love, power, ambition, exile, freedom, betrayal, longing, and the cost of being heard.

This article was published in the Summer 2026 issue of Opera America Magazine.