"I always was trying to make people laugh as a kid. I was a big fan of Carol Burnett and Gilda Radner. I watched them and I remember feeling as a child, when I heard the laughter they got, a little jealous that they made someone laugh like that."

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Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

— Philip Kitcher