Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Suria Bahadue always wanted to be knowledgeable about opera, so she decided to enroll in Professor DelDonna's Opera History course. (Photo: Roland Dimaya)

By Kara Burritt

The only opera great that Suria Bahadue knew of when she enrolled in Professor DelDonna’s Opera History course was Beethoven—thanks to the dog from the 1992 movie of the same name. A Georgetown University junior with a double major in Biology and History, as well as a time-consuming commitment to the university’s softball team, Bahadue might not have known much about opera history before taking DelDonna’s class. She enrolled, however, with an aim to change that.
   
“I’ve always wanted to be knowledgeable about opera,” she says. Growing up in Miami, Bahadue knew many well-read people who seemed to know something about everything: arts, politics, literature, and Bahadue considers opera to be one of those knowledge areas that make a person well-rounded.

Given her lack of musical background and her sense that natural opera fans were the social elite, rather than college students, Bahadue was apprehensive about how challenging the material would be for her. But in Opera History, she says, “Professor DelDonna made [opera] something you would turn on the radio and listen to.”

Bahadue found DelDonna’s passion for the material contagious, and he made the material easy to understand even for students without a background in music. “He would make it a bigger picture about the opera,” says Bahadue. “He made it like a movie: how they wrote the movie, why they wrote the movie.”

After completing Opera History last spring, Bahadue spent the summer studying abroad in Sydney. On her long list of things to do during her brief stay in Australia, she included attending two operas at the world-famous Sydney Opera House. “Seeing something in its true form away from Georgetown, after learning about it at Georgetown, was really cool,” Bahadue says.  

Having relished that opera experience, she looks forward someday to attending an opera in the U.S. to compare the American interpretation of opera with the Australian. Bahadue notes that the same opera might be performed in vastly different ways on different stages. “The masterpieces of the past leave so much room for new creativity,” she says. “I guess that’s why they’re masterpieces.”

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