“Happily I turn to the new delights That make my spirit soar.” Verdi, La Traviata

“How can I not care about you when everything you do grabs my attention?” — My Love, Madame Butterfly by Puccini

As a cellist and an alum of LaGuardia High School, I have been close to opera for a great deal of time now.  I was six when I first fell in love with opera.  The first was Gounod’s Romeo et Juliet.  The captivating music, costumes, scenery, storyline, and intrigue were like nothing I ever encountered before.  I was amazed by how the music brought the classic story to life.  My family and I attended many opera performances since then.  Since my mom created costumes for Broadway shows such as Wicked and Beauty and the Beast as well as for ballets such as Don Quixote, she gave me a background on the costumes.  Also, I could appreciate them because I saw the process costumers underwent to create certain masterpieces.  Fabric draped over mannequins, I watched as pieces of fabric became costumes that told stories in themselves. I also appreciated story-lines and their impact on culture.  Wagner’s The Ring Cycle influenced both The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in both music and plot.  Verdi’s La Traviata was the basis of Maulin Rouge.  But it was the music that reigned supreme.  The composers were the star focus.  Unlike with musicals, we typically do not pay tribute to the librettist; composers are the gods of opera.  The way music evokes certain extramusical ideas to advance the plot, as leitmotivs such as the Tristan Chord do, is astounding.  The way stepping away from major/minor tonality into the world of pentatonic scales transports us to other nations, like Japan in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, is beautiful.  The evolution of opera music is also incredibly intriguing – and one traces this through the music.  I had the pleasure of learning a great deal about operas in high school and even in college.  In high school, I played cello in Offenbach’s La Belle Helen.  This was an incredible experience and I am so grateful for it.  In my Lehman Music History class, Music of the Romantic and Early Modernist Eras, we spent a month on opera of the 19th Century – Rossini, Puccini, Donizetti, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Wagner, etc.  Because of this, I also have a great deal of knowledge about the composers, the technicalities of their music, and the like.  I love continuing to learn about opera.  I have never seen Hansel and Gretel and look forward to it.  The beauty of opera is that every time you see a production, you fall in love with it all over again.  You relive the way your heart felt when you first heard the music, the way the tears fell down your face as you watch the character’s demise, the way you feel when the curtain falls signifying the time to leave and you feel blessed to have seen something so great.  Opera is one of the closest things we have to magic.