Valerie Niemerg – författare

What does a timid pianist from Wichita know about surviving in 18th Century Spain?

Not much. But Elizabeth Kirtenpepper loves the opera.

She loves the beauty, the stories, the passion, and most especially, she loves to play the piano in her cramped, corner studio and watch the performers from the cool, unseen depths of an orchestra pit.

But she certainly never wanted to be in an opera. Certainly not a real-life opera. So, when a strange magical twist of fate transports her into The Marriage of Figaro, Elizabeth must take up employment in an entirely different kind of pit: the scullery of the ruthless and domineering Count Almaviva.

Stuffed into a corset and forced to wear impractical shoes, Elizabeth meets Figaro, Susanna, and the whole cast of memorable characters. But no one is sticking to their story, and a strange, hooded villain is running through the estate, unraveling every bar line and fermata of Mozart''s score! Elizabeth soon realizes that if she wants to return to her 21st-century of indoor plumbing and hair conditioner, everyone else must first return to their original plot.

To confront the nefarious villain (obviously a baritone), Elizabeth will have to summon her own inner diva and vanquish calamities from leprosy and sexual politics to revolutions in Spain. But the little pianist from Kansas may just end up changing her own story as well, when she discovers that -

Everything she ever really needed to know ... well, she learned it at the opera.