Bel Canto
Bel Canto
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Ann Patchett on Bel Canto
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A tame siege and a voice without a languageThe 1996 Lima crisis, in which the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement held more than seventy hostages inside the Japanese ambassador’s residence for four months, was a geopolitical event with an oddly domestic texture. Patchett read about it looking not for violence but for a story, and what she found surprised her.
When I was reading the story of the Lima crisis, I was struck by what a tame crisis it was. The NYT headlines were, ‘Terrorists send out for pizza.’ And they were kids. It was so interesting to watch things unfold.
Once she had her setting and her hostage situation, she still needed to decide who the woman at the center would be. The question was not just biographical but structural: the answer had to explain both why the terrorists kept her and how the novel would move across languages it could not translate.
I was thinking, is she a pianist? Is she a cellist? You know, what would she do? And I finally decided that she would be an opera singer because it would have a sense of the universal language. This book is largely about the suspension of language and communication.
Whatever Patchett set out to write, the finished novel belonged irreversibly to a particular moment in history. When the Chicago Lyric Opera adapted it in 2015, she looked back at the gap between the world she had imagined and the one her readers now lived in.
It was a pre-9/11 world. This book was published in May of 2001, and it has everything to do with that.
She has said plainly that she would never write this novel now. The innocence built into the premise, terrorists who send out for pizza, required a world that no longer existed by the time most readers found the book.
How she wrote it
Opera 101, a borrowed aria, and a floor full of bodiesPatchett came to opera with no background at all. She needed to understand it well enough to make a soprano’s voice the moral center of a novel, and one book did most of that work.
The thing that I found that made such a wonderful difference was a book by a guy named Fred Plotkin called Opera 101… and it really was like taking a class. It really explained how to listen to opera, and to sit down and read the libretto first, and then to listen to the whole opera while you’re reading the libretto again. I had never had that experience, where I would just sit down with a piece of music in my own home and listen to it.
The aria Patchett originally gave her soprano, Roxane Coss, came from her own memory rather than from research: she had seen the 1981 French film Diva repeatedly and lifted its central piece of music. Her UK editor, Christopher Potter, caught the problem before the book went to press and made a substitution that reshaped the novel’s entire afterlife.
I saw it over and over again, which is exactly why I picked it. He told me that anyone who knows anything about opera will know you are ripping off this movie — which I was! — so I asked him to pick out an aria for me that was obscure and would make me seem super smart. And that’s what set all of this in motion, I swear to you, because that was Renée’s signature aria. When you think of Rusalka, you think of Renée. And that’s why everybody sent the book to her when it came out.
Potter chose Rusalka’s “Song to the Moon.” The friendship between Patchett and soprano Renée Fleming grew from that one editorial correction.
Managing a cast drawn from a dozen nationalities meant that even small decisions, like what to call a character, required outside help. Patchett had no personal associations with most of the name pools she needed, and she solved the problem with a methodical workaround.
The interesting thing was naming characters in Bel Canto because they are all from different countries. I would call a friend and say, ‘Give me a list of Japanese names,’ and then I would just pick one. I had no associations with the names.
When Patchett returned to the manuscript in 2024 to prepare an annotated edition, she read it with two decades of distance and found herself confronting choices she could no longer fully explain. One of them was the novel’s long, static opening, in which virtually every character spends the first hundred pages on the floor of a mansion.
Why is everybody lying on the floor for the first hundred pages?... What an incredibly bad idea, and yet — and yet it works. How did I — how in the world did I have the nerve to do that?
The annotated edition also prompted her to reconsider what the hostage situation itself was doing in the book. Looking back from 2026, after finishing a new novel with a quieter architecture, she named the impulse she had been acting on without quite realizing it.
I didn’t trust myself as much, and I felt like I needed to dress it up... In order to make it exciting. Even though, you know, it’s a book about strangers coming together and forming connections, I needed to crank up the stakes.
The personal thread
Filling stone with lifeReturning to the manuscript for the 2024 annotated edition, Patchett noticed something she had not consciously registered while writing: the novel is saturated with religious feeling. She connected that discovery to where she was in her own life at the time of composition.
There’s a lot about God in Bel Canto. There’s a lot about faith. And one of the things that I found very moving when I went back to it was I was much closer to my Catholic faith when I was 35 or 34, when I was writing that book.
That closeness to faith had a specific history. In a conversation with US Catholic magazine, Patchett described how twelve years of Catholic schooling had trained her in a particular kind of imaginative act, one she later recognized as the same act she performed as a novelist.
on my knees in front of pieces of carved marble, and in my heart I was filling that stone with enormous life
She called that the essence of storytelling: taking something inert and persuading a reader, or a congregation, to animate it from within.
What she wants us to sit with
The one thing language cannot doAfter September 11, 2001, book clubs turned to Bel Canto in numbers that surprised Patchett. The hardback had sold modestly; the paperback broke through because readers were looking for fiction that processed political violence. She described the dynamic in an interview, with some wry surprise at the logic.
So of course what would you go to but a book about an opera singer being held captive in a giant mansion. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s single translator, Gen Watanabe, is overwhelmed from the opening hours of the siege, pulled in every direction by hostages and captors who share no common tongue. Patchett has described what happens when language exhausts itself and something else has to carry the load.
At first, everyone is trying to communicate through him, and then they try and communicate really through their love of art.
The Lyric Opera production premiered in late 2015, two weeks after the Paris attacks. The timing made audiences and critics ask whether the subject matter was appropriate. Patchett’s answer was a claim about what art is for, not just in crisis but as a permanent condition.
It is the role of art to help us find some comfort and to make us think things through, to reflect. It’s got to be interpreted through art; it’s the only way that we as animals can make sense of our lives.