There is a libretto in the pocket of my backpack.
It’s sat there for just a few weeks, ready for me should I need it. Though there is little use for me to listen to the opera itself, its words are in Italian and I do not know the music well enough to keep in time with the English words written on the pages of this little red book.
I am not entirely sure why it is there.
I found it at a bookshop in New York, in the basement of The Strand, a three story store that boasts about being an independent bookseller for over 95 years, not that I understood (or understand) that point now.
It felt old when I walked into the store.
Rationally I knew it was, it had been open for almost 100 years and carried all manner of books to resell, but when I walked into the store it felt the same way that museums do: old and musty but in a barely covered up way, carry pieces of history that had been around for longer than I have been (not a difficult task, I am just twenty years old).
The libretto sat under a pile of handwritten sheet music that I took my time flipping through, listening to the carefully constructed sheet music as it played almost-right in my head. It was pretty, violin and piano duets with a not particularly complicated piano line.
I took my time flipping through the libretto’s as well, a few of the titles were familiar, or the composer. I found the one that I now keep in my pocket at the bottom of the stack. The story was familiar, something that I recognized from my music theory courses or years of training, I flipped through it slowly.
And then some paper fell out of the pages.
My first thought was that I accidentally damaged the book and now I had to buy it no matter what, but I didn’t recognize them at first. The little cardstock red squares that matched the red of the libretto. I flipped them over without really thinking about the significance of these little pieces of paper:
“January 2, 1992. Box Seats.”
I know for a fact that it took me a minute to understand the date written on the tickets.
But the moment that I did I felt almost in awe.
Here I was, thirty years later, flipping through libretto’s in a used book store suddenly holding tickets that had enough sentimental value to the person who came before me that they stuck it in between the pages of this book and kept it.
I do not know the story behind these two tickets. I don’t know whether or not it was a new couple going to the opera the first time, or a parent taking their child to their first opera, or if this was a couple well into their lives who regularly attended the opera every season.
It’s the unknown history behind the tickets that got me to buy the libretto.
And it’s the unknown history like this that keeps me wrapped up in the idea of becoming a historian. The concept of now owning a little piece of someone else's history, I may not know the whole story, but I have this little piece of it, which makes the thousands of years of human kind all the more tangible.