# What drew you into opera?



## Winslow (Jun 11, 2018)

When I was a child, my exposure to opera was twofold. There was my grandmother who would love to listen to her Caruso records after dinner, and there were the cartoons I watched every Saturday, depicting opera as some form if a joke. I loved them both, my grandmother and cartoons. However, they both presented opera in ways that impacted me. Unfortunately, the image I had in my head was Robinson Caruso wearing a horned helmet, this did not draw me in. Some years later, while enjoying various opera compilations, of differing artists, I came across Maria Callas’s performance of La Gioconda, and became obsessed to the point of purchasing every recording of hers that I could find. I’ve grown to love all opera, but prefer Verdi, Puccini, and of course, those which are performed by Callas.


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## BalalaikaBoy (Sep 25, 2014)

I was drawn to it from an early age because I had a dark, heavy voice from age 14, and all the light boy band music just wasn't working for me.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

I developed a deep passion for music in my early teens and was just voracious in my exploration, and that included classical. First opera I heard was the movie version of Carmen I rented at my local Hollywood Video and I probably watched it 10 times in about two weeks, and I've been hooked ever since.


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## Thomyum2 (Apr 18, 2018)

I was in advanced French class my senior year in high school and we had been assigned to read Beaumarchais' _Le Barbier de Seville_. In the course of studying the play, our teacher had us listen to a number of the arias from Rossini's opera. I found the music fun, humorous and addictive and wanted to hear more - it hooked me, and I haven't stopped listening to opera since.


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## Annied (Apr 27, 2017)

In my case it was buying a new cassette recorder. I'd lost interest in pop music and was looking for something different to listen to. I'd always loved operatic voices, but struggled with the music when I'd dabbled in the past. This particular time I borrowed 3 "Collections" from the library by Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti and played them over and over again on the basis that arias were probably a better bet than full operas at that point. Some of the arias did nothing for me, despite repeated playing, but others I loved. It also became clear fairly quickly that, of the three, Carreras had the voice that suited me the best, so in due course, I went back to the local library to see if there were any full operas featurning him. The only one I could find was "L'Elisir d'amore" which was probably the best one I could have chosen at that stage. At this point I became a lady on a mission. I scoured all the other libraries in the area and came back with all the Philips early Verdi operas. I also borrowed books on opera and was at the local library 2 or 3 times a week looking up everything I couldn't understand, which was a lot as I was starting from scratch. (This was all pre Internet.)

I'll never do more than dabble as my very lopsided ear limits what music I find enjoyable, but not only did finally being able to reconcile the voices with the music open up a whole new world that I'd now hate to be without, it also brought me some longlasting friendships.


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

My first experience of opera was in the 1980s. I grew up on rock music and had dabbled in classical at my father's suggestion. I liked it, but it was often a bit boring to me then. But then I saw an ad for the Michigan Opera Theater which was local to me and thought that it would be far more interesting with classical music combined with a story, scenery, vocals, and acting. So in the early 1980s I attended probably a dozen operas, including the MET which would tour Detroit and Chicago in those days. Alas, it was before the days of surtitles over the stage, so it was not as engaging as it could have been. But I did learn it was a great way to get dates with some of the better class of young ladies to ask them to the opera. (Sure beats the blind date that met me in a parking lot and was sipping on a quart beer in a brown paper bag.) Ironically, my wife hates opera.

Scroll forward about 25 years. So I had not really been listening to much music over the years what with raising a family and all the associated busywork, then one day, in 2009 I discovered MP3 players. I started listening to my favorite non-classical artist and built up a massive collection of all his music, listening to nothing but that for a couple years. One day in August 2011 I saw a cheezy classical disk at a dollar store that had a piece that I liked, so bought it. That started the ball rolling and I basically went all classical from then on to this day. You will see I joined TC shortly after that. I listened a lot to choral works and Beethoven piano sonatas then started really getting into Beethoven and that led to Fidelio. Eventually I decided that I ought to watch a DVD of Fidelio to understand it better and so in December 2014 watched my first opera with subtitles and was hooked.

My addition to opera is such that I have multiple copies of many operas (e.g., 24 sets on CD of Fidelio, 18 sets of La Sonnambula, and 17 sets of the Flying Dutchman). I would have many more of some other operas but there are not many recordings on the market. Anyway, my listening anymore is somewhere around 98% opera. I also have amassed some 175 or so opera DVDs. Again I have multiple copies of some on DVD like 9 (and another on order) for La Fancuilla del West. Probably as many Fidelio too. I even took one of my favorite operas, Flotow's Marth, which was only on You Tube for one performance, and a wonderful one at that, ripped it to MP4 and spent many hours entering some 1250 subtitles.


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## Prat (Jun 15, 2018)

Cowboys singing in Opera


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

Prat said:


> Cowboys singing in Opera


Puccini's La Fanciulla del West?


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## nina foresti (Mar 11, 2014)

Aside from my soprano mother who used to sing arias around the house, especially "Depuis la jour", the real enlightenment for me came from Mario Lanza and _The Great Caruso _which I learned every word from beginning to end and saw 24 times.


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## Sauvee (Feb 5, 2018)

Well, i always liked the challenge of trying to figure out what the heck they are singing, and what is going on in terms of plot. it's also a surprisingly good way of learning a bit of history (not that the stories themselves tend to have much accuracy, but just in learning about the general historical events and such). Strangely I never used to like the opera singing style that much, but I guess it's just a matter of getting used to it, because I started off just listening to just a bit now and then, and the more I listened the more I would like it and want to listen to it more.


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## Sieglinde (Oct 25, 2009)

We have listened to some bits of Zauberflöte in 4th grade, but I wasn't interested yet back then. 2 years later, I found an old opera tales book at my grandparents' place and read it for the stories, then I wanted to see one live. It happened to be _Trovatore_. It was magical. I have a soft spot for Verdi baritones ever since.


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## RogerExcellent (Jun 11, 2018)

Being a roger I have no choice


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

I tried opera after having listened to mainly classical music for about five years, so when I was 35. My father gave me the box of Solti's Wagner Ring der Nibelungen as a birthday gift. After that, I explored a few more (all of Puccini, and a number by Beethoven, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Boito, Mussorgsky, Strauss, Britten), skipping some famous names (Mozart, Handel) based on extracts I had heard. Stopped around 1999, when I moved to Singapore and had to store my vast CD collection in the Netherlands.

I found my opera experience over those years interesting but ultimately preferred other forms of classical music. Over the last three years or so, I've started playing opera again. There's simply too much good music by top composers in this genre to neglect it.


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## Guest (Jun 17, 2018)

Fritz Kobus said:


> Puccini's La Fanciulla del West?


I was actually thinking Wuorinen's Brokeback Mountain......


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Singing. I loved to sing from an early age, and when I heard what the human voice was capable of, it was all over. I always wanted to be Lauritz Melchior; that was hopeless, but as you can see, I make a pretty good Tito Schipa.


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

As a late teen browsing the records (yes, records) section of my local library, I came across the opera collection. Wagner's works, based on German and Scandinavian legends and myths, sounded intriguing. _Parsifal_ was too much for me at first; _Tannhäuser_ made an impression; the Ring got me hooked. Since then I've never looked back.



Winslow said:


> I came across Maria Callas's performance of La Gioconda, and became obsessed to the point of purchasing every recording of hers that I could find.


Just listened to this recording for the first time last night. Always more to learn!


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## Guest (Jun 17, 2018)

As with anything else, I was drawn to it because it was something I didn't know anything about. When I first heard of this thing called 'opera' I had many many questions I kept asking. How come they only play arias on the radio during the day time? How do people manage to sing very difficult music and act simultaneously for such long stretches of time? How come the CDs I have at home of Wagner only have orchestral excerpts on them when that vocal score I managed to get hold of of Tristan und Isolde clearly has a lot more in it than orchestral excerpts? (and what's more, it seems like a difficult score to even be able to take anything out of context!) Do musicians unions get angry about the fact that Das Rheingold goes for up to two and a half hours without a break when there are guidelines as to the maximum length of rehearsal time before the musicians have to have a break?

I ended up watching a TV broadcast of HMS Pinafore one day which I found dreadfully boring. Then another day I watched a really really fascinating production from somewhere in Europe of L'Orfeo; the stage design had classical allusions, but there was something decidedly abstract and modern about it which intrigued me. Then another day I watched an entire production of La Bohème on TV which had a wonderful modern setting that I adored so much that for a while I firmly believed that all operas should be performed in an updated, modern setting. I think I was 10 or 11 by this stage.

The first opera I ever saw was a wonderfully minimalist staging of Handel's Giulio Cesare when I was about 12 or 13 years old. The following few years I subscribed to one of our opera companies who has a great reputation here for productions which tend towards the modern or the abstract. They also commission a new opera for each season, so it was great to see a bunch of world premieres in addition to fantastic operas already in the repertoire like Nixon in China, The Rake's Progress, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Magic Flute, La Traviata and others.

Of course, I am still attracted by things that are new to me, and I am forever hungry for new interpretations of older repertoire as I am for new repertoire itself.

Some of my favourite directors include Romeo Castellucci, Neil Armfield, Barrie Kosky, Harry Kupfer, Patrice Chereau and (of course) Wieland Wagner. Some of my favourite singers include Maria Callas, Enrico Caruso, Klaus Florian Vogt, Warwick Fyfe, Anja Harteros, Anja Kampe, Waltraud Meier, Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Wolfgang Koch, Stuart Skelton, Nina Stemme and Barbara Hannigan.


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## Tsaraslondon (Nov 7, 2013)

Winslow said:


> When I was a child, my exposure to opera was twofold. There was my grandmother who would love to listen to her Caruso records after dinner, and there were the cartoons I watched every Saturday, depicting opera as some form if a joke. I loved them both, my grandmother and cartoons. However, they both presented opera in ways that impacted me. Unfortunately, the image I had in my head was Robinson Caruso wearing a horned helmet, this did not draw me in. Some years later, while enjoying various opera compilations, of differing artists, I came across Maria Callas's performance of La Gioconda, and became obsessed to the point of purchasing every recording of hers that I could find. I've grown to love all opera, but prefer Verdi, Puccini, and of course, those which are performed by Callas.


My experience rather mirrors your own. We were a musical family, my father played the piano and conducted many of the local amateur operatic societies, my mother sang, I played the piano and my brother the clarinet. My father's preference was operetta and musicals rather than opera, but we did go to the opera whenever touring companies came our way, so I was quite young when I saw my first opera.

That said, like you, it was the voice of Callas that really did it for me. Someone played me a record of her early Cetra stuff (issued, I think by World Record Club). It had excerpts from her Cetra recordings of *La Traviata* and *La Gioconda* on it, and I was absolutely transfixed. At that time I probably wasn't so aware, as I am now, of her superior musicianship. It was more the _sound_ of the voice and the way it was used to searingly expressive ends.

Shortly after that, as a student at Newcastle University, I queued for a Glyndebourne Touring Opera production of *La Boheme*, and ended up sharing a box (the only seats left) with three other single people I had never met. The production was traditional, but starred a group of believably young singers (Linda Esther Gray was the Mimi) and it moved me so much that I cried even in the first act. Boheme rarely has that effect on me nowadays, but it was that production which really set me off, and I would try to see literally every single opera production that came up my way, whether it be Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, Puccini, Henze or Britten.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

I would have to thank PBS for that! It was during the 1980s when I got my first exposures to opera: first *Meyerbeer's L'Africaine* and then *Wagner's Ring* (Levine and the MET, with Jerusalem, Behrens, Norman, Salminen, Morris). It was the latter that proved to be, in quoting F. Murray Abraham "truly an odyssey to us all." I still remember that week in watching the PBS broadcast fondly.

It is that one example one must use in arguing the importance of sponsoring and supporting the arts, by we the people and by our government, not to cut, cut, cut. But that's another topic, on a different thread, and for another time.


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## Reichstag aus LICHT (Oct 25, 2010)

My grandfather had a nice (untrained) bass voice. My mother, who was trained, has a beautiful soprano voice; she was a friend, and near-contemporary of British mezzo Della Jones, and could easily have had a career to rival Della's, had she not quit singing when she met my father. I also grew up in the Welsh Methodist tradition, where I got to hear four-part choral singing of a remarkably high standard every Sunday at chapel. This background must have prepared the ground, and I owe it a great debt of gratitude, but I wasn't really "into" opera, or music in general come to that.

The epiphany came when I attended a schools promenade concert when I was 13 or 14. There was no vocal music on the bill, but the _Siegfried Idyll_ was, and the compère (I think it was Jack Brymer) gave the back-story, focusing on the _Ring_ rather than the "Cosima connection". I didn't particularly care for the _Idyll_ (I still don't) but I was so intrigued by the _Ring_ mythos that I immediately joined my local Record Library, where the very first item I borrowed was a (mono!) box-set of Solti's _Siegfried_. That was actually the first opera I'd ever heard, and I was instantly hooked.


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## mountmccabe (May 1, 2013)

I've talked about getting obsessed with opera before, but not much about what primed me.

There was a lot of music played in the house while I was growing up. There was a lot of classic rock from when my parents were younger, but also some classical music. There was a record set of highlights. I certainly paid a lot of attention; I'd get annoyed when "Bolero" would inevitably be turned down. There was a set of Beethoven symphonies in there, too, and for a long time they made me thinking of a particular drive.

I really liked _Evita_ (my parents had seen the touring production when I was 6), though I really didn't understand the story. (It was quite surprising when I finally saw the musical live).

I joined the school band because I wanted to know more about music and played trombone. I was better at the theory that performance, but oh well. Something stuck. And I remember one of the other trombonists playing Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" when he died (not that I really knew who he was).

As I started to get into music I didn't really listen to classical, and certainly not opera. I had seen bits opera on PBS and it all looked so old-fashioned: giant clothes, even bigger wigs, and courtly manners and nothing made sense. I had a few classical tapes or CDs, but they never grabbed me.

Eventually a classical CD did grab me (Beethoven's 5th & 7th under Carlos Kleiber) and I really got into it, and explored. Not much opera, though liked overtures. Then one day in a CD shop I was browsing used CDs and saw a copy of _Nixon in China_. I was flabbergasted. I looked it over and it was real, and really about President Nixon's visit to China. Something that had happened a few years before I was born. I had no idea people were writing new operas, or that an opera could be about modern times. I didn't buy the CD set, but I went home and thought about it for days and then went back to the shop to get it and the set was gone. Possibly for the best* because the very idea stuck with me and changed my outlook on opera and I started to try more.

* Even though I eventually did buy _Nixon in China_ and love the opera and seeing it at the Live in HD screening helped ramp up my opera fandom.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

RogerExcellent said:


> Being a roger I have no choice


As in Symanowski's _King Roger_?

Or because of Roger Federora, the Caruso lookalike?


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## RogerExcellent (Jun 11, 2018)

Are there any Rogers who are not opera obsessives?


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## aussiebushman (Apr 21, 2018)

In the late 40's I was still in my pre-teen years and had an old valve radio in my bedroom. Most nights, I would tune into either the BBC or Voice of America. Those were the days of broadcasting excellence with opera and classical music predominating. If I recall correctly, it was the Bayreuth performances that first got me interested in opera Wagner's music in particular, but there were many others of great distinction on the BBC .

Thought I was too young to appreciate it this was during the "golden age" of singers. Not the least of the broadcasts would have included Welitsch, Jurinac, Melchior, Windgassen, Schipa, Ponselle, Corelli

Who would not be an opera lover after that


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## GeorgeMcW (Jun 4, 2018)

I started listening to CDs and records from my school library. But my listening then was mostly instrumental music (I studied the piano). I was really drawn to late romantic/early twentieth century music, as a typical teen. The frst opera I saw was Wozzeck when I was 14, and I loved it. I gradually added more opera to my listening - Mozart, Wagner, Strauss, Janacek, Berg, Bartok. 

Then for the past 10 or so years, I listened to almost all instrumental, particularly chamber, music. Only returning to opera recently. 

And what a world!


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## GeorgeMcW (Jun 4, 2018)

RogerExcellent said:


> Are there any Rogers who are not opera obsessives?


I once saw Roger Federer at Covent Garden. No kidding! It was the Barber of Seville.


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## Andrew Kenneth (Feb 17, 2018)

Watching John Boorman's "Excalibur" at a tender age;which uses "Siegfried's funeral march" throughout the film and also Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", some years later, which features the ride of the valkyries steered me into becoming thoroughly interested in Wagner.


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## perempe (Feb 27, 2014)

cheap tickets. the cheapest ticket were $1.5 to Erkel Theatre (Budapest), so I went to see Rigoletto in November, 2013.


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## laurabaker (Jul 14, 2018)

My mom is an opera singer and so she took me to my first opera (actually it was an operetta) when I was 2 years old. She is a permanent member at the theater in Heidelberg for almost 20 years now and back then in 2006 (yeah I know I am really young ) they did "Student Prince"at the Schlossfestspiele Heidelberg (you know, up on the really popular, romantic castle in Heidelberg). Now probably everybody is gonna say something like that it is dumb to take a toddler to an operetta but I am gonna tell you: that night I sat in that audience, not making one sound, not standing up one time, I just sat on my seat, totally fascinated. It was a warm midsummer night, the sun was slowly going down behind the hills of Heidelberg, there was this really special beautiful smell in the air and the music was blowing me away and it was like another world I had been transported to. And that is also what drew me into opera: to be transported to another world through the music. And I love that world. From that moment everything was clear. Since then I have been in approximately 50-60 different productions. Today I am 14 years old and looking forward to start studying voice in 4 years when I graduate high school. I mean this is probably gonna sound a little cheesy but I actually mean it: Today I could not imagine living without opera.


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