Maybe the production team for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette has a newly acquired taste for high Cs and Wagnerian levels of personality conflict, but this reality-show franchise has suddenly made a habit of casting aspiring opera singers.
The newest edition of The Bachelorette premieres Monday night, with tenor Bradley Wisk included among the initial 25 contestants vying for a rose from "bachelorette" Andi Dorfman. On Wisk's
website
If you're curious to hear Wisk in action in pure classical mode, we've dug up a video of him singing the ever-popular "Che gelida manina" aria from Puccini's La Bohème.
Maybe Wisk's turn on The Bachelorette — regardless of how many roses he accepts along the way — will provide just the kind of media exposure that he seems to be seeking for his own, not-so-highbrow career. But he might also want to heed the words of Sharleen Joynt, the young soprano who recently, and famously,
decided to leave
Joynt is no Miss America talent-competition-level dilettante, and, unlike Wisk, she's a hardcore opera singer. This past season, she's been
covering
In retrospect, though, it seems like Joynt may have made a serious career misstep by appearing on an immensely popular reality TV show. In separate interviews, Joynt has told a couple of our classical media friends that she thinks appearing on The Bachelor has held her back professionally. "I wouldn't say this has helped my career," she
told
On WQXR's Conducting Business podcast, the clearly talented Joynt
told
"Everything I have done in my life, more or less, has been for this career [in opera]," Joynt told Lewin. "And so to suddenly maybe to be taken less seriously because I spent two months filming a reality show — it's a little heartbreaking, in a way." Joynt says she thought she was doing a good job of splitting the two by not mentioning the show on her own, completely opera-geared website. (I say: Google knows no bounds.)
Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit
http://www.npr.org/