From Periodic Table to Libretto
Growing up the child of a famous scientist, Karyl Charna Lynn, CW’65, was expected to follow her father’s path. She pursued chemistry throughout her schooling, but when she started writing about opera, she knew she’d found her passion.
Karyl Charna Lynn, CW’65, grew up in a “scientific but quiet household.” She understood that her dad worked in atomic energy, but there were never any dinner-table conversations about his job. “I knew absolutely nothing except never to ask my father what he did at work,” she says.
As it turns out, her father, Bernard Kopelman, was part of the Manhattan Project, traveling to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oakridge, Tennessee, to work on the atomic bomb. Such details emerged later in Lynn’s life, but as a child—and an only child, at that—one thing was clear: Her scientist father, with his PhD in thermodynamics, expected her to follow his path. “He always had this vision of me being an important scientist like him,” Lynn explains.

Lynn, CW’65, in front of the Lerner Center (formerly the Music building) on Penn’s campus in September 2024. She has returned to campus many times over the years, including for her 50th reunion. She plans to come back for her 60th reunion in 2025.
But writing was her passion, and almost accidentally, she discovered a love of opera. Eventually she figured out a way to combine the two. “I started as a scientist and ended up as an opera critic,” Lynn says.
During a career that’s spanned decades, she’s written six books on the subject, traveling the world to visit more than 300 opera houses. For 28 years, she worked for the London-based Opera Now magazine as a contributing editor, critic, and correspondent, and today, continues reviewing operas for her own website, theoperacritic.net.
Fitting In Music Between Chem Labs
The opera industry Lynn first started paying attention to barely resembles what exists now, she says. “One major change is it went from the singers being the most important part of an opera to the directors having the majority of the power.” Today, according to Lynn, opera productions with traditional staging are a relative rarity compared to updated, minimalistic, or symbolically infused versions in an attempt to make them more relatable to today’s audiences and attract new operagoers to the theatre.
Lynn gets it. “Some opera performances are very powerful. Others I have trouble staying awake through,” she says. “It just really depends.” The first opera she saw, at age 5, was Hansel and Gretl, which she recalls being fine—“nothing extraordinary.” When she was 7, her parents brought her to her first “real” opera, Tristan und Isolde, “which was, like, six hours long,” she recalls. “I refused to go to another.”
My four years at Penn were very positive. They rank up there as some of the four best years of my life.
The boycott didn’t last long, though, because her parents enjoyed the genre, and growing up on Long Island meant close proximity to the New York City theatre world. “I was brought up in a performing arts cultural environment. I had interests in the arts,” she says. “But academically, I was pushed into chemistry.”
After attending Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for prep school, she came to Penn, intrigued by its chemistry department, its proximity to a big city, and its distance from New England’s winter weather. (Being co-ed after an all-girls prep school didn’t hurt, either, she says.)
Lynn found the chemistry courses easy, but felt frustrated by her 20 hours of classes a week, including labs, compared to the lighter loads—and free afternoons—of her classmates. As an antidote, she got herself a subscription to the Philadelphia Orchestra. “Those were the days of [famed conductor] Eugene Ormandy. I had a ticket in the nosebleed section,” she says. “Back then it was all male musicians. No women. After two years I decided I wanted more than just to watch these men in tails play instruments. That’s when I started going back to New York. My mother had a subscription to the Met, and I used to meet her there.”

Lynn at the opening night of the Los Angeles Opera, which she was covering for Opera Now. (Image: Courtesy of Karyl Charna Lynn)
During that time, Lynn also took whatever humanities classes she could fit into her schedule at Penn, courses like History of the Opera (still taught today), History of the Symphony, and Russian History. “Those were the first three As I got, and I only got one A in a science course,” she recalls. “Science was easy for me, but I never studied that hard.” She graduated from Penn in 1965 and headed to a PhD program at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons “where I got one C, a failing grade in graduate school,” she says. “That was my rebellion—I didn’t want a career in science.”
The Evolution to Opera Critic
Today, when a female tries out graduate school and quickly learns it’s not for her, she can shift careers relatively easily. Not so for a woman in Lynn’s generation at the time she attempted it. “Back then, you have to understand, if you had all this education, you were expected to do something with it. Now the thinking is a lot more liberal than it used to be.”
So, Lynn inched away from academia, slowly at first, taking a job in science as a lab tech doing drug distribution studies. She then lived in Germany for a stint before returning to the States. “It was a classic case of being at the right place at the right time,” she says. German television network ZDF had both science and medical programs, and its correspondent happened to be returning to Germany. Lynn, having just lived in a place where she could study the German language, took her place, working for ZDF for 10 years, a time during which she also earned a master’s degree in film and broadcast journalism.
When Lynn later moved to Tennessee, her evolution to opera critic continued. Her experience with German medical and science reporting didn’t open any doors there, but given her childhood and time during college going to operas, she knew a fair bit about that genre. There weren’t any traditional operas for her to see in Nashville, but there was the Grand Ole Opry, (country music’s biggest stage and the state’s version of opera) so she thought, why not try her hand at writing about those shows? Eventually that morphed into writing about opera, and she hasn’t stopped since.
Lynn became a self-taught opera critic and author, eventually penning six books in 12 years, traveling to hundreds of opera houses around the world. “After the sixth book,” she says, “I began writing for a London-based magazine called Opera Now,” something she continued for nearly three decades, becoming a contributing editor and senior international correspondent. She now reviews operas for her own website, theoperacritic.net.
It’s a far cry from her 12-year-old self, who once received The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics from her father inscribed with the note, “From an almost Nobel Prize winner in 1955 to a future Nobel Prize winner.” But Lynn says her only regret is that she didn’t pursue her passion sooner. “It was a long road, but I was able to segue into media by reporting about science and finally writing about the arts,” she says.
These days, she gets back to Philadelphia often from her home in Washington, DC, and says she plans to come for her 60th college reunion in 2025. “My four years at Penn were very positive,” Lynn says. “They rank up there as some of the four best years of my life.”