Engineers aren’t allergic to art. There’s a reason our Faculty offers an “Engineering Music Performance Minor.” We like elegance, symmetry, and choreography, which acts as a system that does exactly what it’s supposed to do. Which is precisely why opera, an art form built on excess and emotional gridlock, often leaves us unmoved.

Consider Don Giovanni (1787), composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. It’s based on the Don Juan legend: a nobleman who seduces women compulsively because he believes he can repent right before death. Early in the opera, Don Giovanni attempts to assault a woman, kills her father when confronted, and escapes. So far, this reads as a straightforward villain narrative.

Then comes the opera’s most famous moment: the Catalogue Aria, in which Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello explains that his master keeps a detailed list of every woman he has slept with: 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, and 1,003 in Spain. The point is metaphysical excess, desire without limit, appetite as an end in itself. Kierkegaard famously thought this was one of the most profound moments in all of art.

Engineers hear this and think, “this process is unstable.”

There is no optimization, no learning, no terminal condition. The system exists solely to increment a counter. Don Giovanni does not refine his approach, develop preferences, or adjust based on outcomes. This is presented as existential depth, but to an engineer it looks like an infinite loop that no one bothered to debug.

Or take Eugene Onegin (1879) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, based on the verse novel by Alexander Pushkin. Onegin coldly rejects a young woman’s emotional confession, provokes his best friend into a duel out of boredom, kills him, and then wanders for years before realizing (too late) that he loved the woman all along. The tragedy hinges entirely on emotional inertia. No one is externally constrained; they simply refuse to act until action becomes impossible.

Opera frames this as fate, while engineers accurately diagnose this as “unhandled latency.”

But here’s the more uncomfortable truth: most engineers don’t just struggle with opera structurally. They struggle with it thematically.

Despite the stereotype, most engineers are not manic libertines or romantic catastrophes. Many are not sex freaks. Many have never maintained a catalogue of lovers. Many have never even held hands romantically. Their emotional lives, if anything, are defined more by absence than excess: missed signals, delayed confidence, cautious optimization of feelings that may never execute.

Unlike myself (a proudly deranged degenerate), most engineers cannot relate to operas whose central concerns are overwhelming erotic compulsion, grand romantic gesture, or desire so powerful it destroys lives. When opera insists that everyone is constantly on the brink of emotional combustion, engineers feel excluded rather than enlightened.

Opera assumes a baseline of intense feeling which engineers, for better or worse, lack.

This is why engineers often disengage. Opera presents inefficiency as profundity, emotional chaos as destiny, and unbounded desire as philosophy. Engineers see characters refusing to communicate, systems failing for symbolic reasons, and problems left unsolved until they become terminal.

Maybe someday, the engineers with a music minor can compose a short opera for Skule Night that will appeal to engineers both structurally and thematically (maybe about pulling an all-nighter in Bahen), but that day is yet to come. For now, the appeal of this music genre stumps most engineers.