I didn’t know that I needed an opera podcast in my life until I heard the trailer for “Aria Code,” a new ten-episode series from the New York classical-music station WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera, and swooned with joy. Three episodes in, I’m still swooning. The show’s concept is simple: its host, Rhiannon Giddens, introduces us to one famous opera aria each week; experts provide insight, laced with music; we hear the aria in its entirety. That’s it. It’s an elegantly constructed, effortlessly listenable series that does exactly what you’d hope a general-interest opera podcast would do. It also avoids most of what you’d hope it would avoid—pandering, dumbing down, trying to make opera seem hip. (It gets away with its silly name, just barely, by claiming to “decode” what makes arias great.) The show seems to understand that there are plenty of people who know a little bit about opera and might like to know more; to do that, it makes use of the Met’s archive…
