Eh, What’s Up, Doc? How Bugs Bunny Influenced Opera

Kudos to the Wall Street Journal for reporting today on a generation of opera performers and patrons whose musical interests were profoundly influenced while planted before a TV set to watch Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Take Jamie Barton, now 34. Her parents didn’t show her these cartons—but her smart grandparents did! The result? Ms. Barton fell in love with the music of Gioachino Rossini through “Rabbit of Seville.” In this 1949 cartoon, Bugs “shaves Elmer with a lawn mower, massages his scalp with his hind paws and polishes his pate with a shoeshine rag.” Today, Ms. Barton plays Waltraute (one of the nine Valkyries) in a current Washington National Opera production— the Kennedy Center’s $10 million production that took a decade to make.

In another Warner Bros. classic, “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Bugs Bunny is at the center of a mélange of Wagner music from the Ring, “Tannhäuser” and “The Flying Dutchman.” Elmer is the hunter; Bugs is his prey; and to this music they animate a drama of “wooer-and-wooed.”

Lo and behold, a 5 year old boy (now 37) in Des Moines, Iowa was entranced. Michael Heaston shares his account with the Journal: ‘“Growing up in Iowa there’s not a lot of opera—I know that may come as a shock,’ recalls Mr. Heaston, 37, a former pianist for the Dallas Opera and now adviser to the artistic director of the Washington National Opera. ‘At a very base level, that’s what I got from Looney Tunes at a very early age: I learned how to tell stories through music.’”