Fulfilling a passion, opera comes to dinosaur hall

New York : From age five until her teenage years, Rhoda Knight Kalt had a Friday ritual -- leave school at noon and spend the rest of the day among dinosaurs.

Her grandfather, Charles R. Knight, was a celebrated naturalist artist whose paintings of dinosaurs helped shape popular perceptions of how the giant prehistoric reptiles lived.

Kalt would sit next to him at New York's American Museum of Natural History and watch as he painstakingly sketched the fossils, which he later turned into vivid recreations that appeared in frames or in books and magazines.

Yet Knight had a side passion -- he loved opera, befriending divas and singing for pleasure. More than 60 years after he died, his opera side is finally coming to fruition.

An original opera, which revolves around young Rhoda and her afternoons with her grandfather, premieres Saturday, with a chamber orchestra playing inside the museum in a hall that is home to the world's first mounted sauropod dinosaur and an imposing tyrannosaurus rex.

"Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt" will be the first opera ever performed in the dinosaur exhibition of the sprawling complex on the western edge of Central Park, according to the museum.

"My grandfather loved the opera and, as a matter of fact, he had a magnificent voice," explained the bubbly Kalt, who called the creation of the piece "very exciting."

Kalt, who is eager to chat at length about her life (other than to disclose her age), wrote for the defunct Junior Natural History magazine aimed at young people and still regularly visits the museum.

"Really, it was my whole childhood -- coming here and being with the museum," she said as she sat on a bench beneath the dinosaurs.