Look. I was right there with you. Opera once was new to me too . . . and I wanted none of it.

So I am doubly delighted with the emails received since our session preparing for the Met’s streaming production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Many of you wrote that Cenerentola was the first opera you had experienced, or the first one you shared with your children. By and large, you seemed to have had a grand time of it.

Your enthusiastic notes easily persuaded me to schedule another session. The details are below (it is free, but do register to get the link). Looking at the Met’s schedule, I decided to pick Puccini’s La Bohème, particularly since this production filmed back in 1977 features the incomparable Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti. If those two sang in the middle of a cornfield, the angels themselves would descend to hear them!

[You can register for this webinar here.]

But boy oh boy! You cannot get much further apart in style and substance than La Cenerentola and La Bohème. That’s another reason to choose it. Don’t expect to be laughing at comic antics or marveling at over-the-top vocal fireworks. But you will be enveloped in gorgeous melodies and caramel harmonies. And you may well join countless others who reach for a Kleenex during the final scene.

La Bohème’s ordinary story and mundane characters erase the idea that opera is about elite subjects or designed solely for high-brow audiences. Opera did have an aristocratic origin when first created in Florence around 1600. But it diversified in wonderful ways and spread across Europe to become the most popular entertainment for the next 300 years. It waned in impact only when the new media of moving pictures and television stole its thunder.

New operas are still composed and do find their audiences, although we’re not likely to recapture the glory days when singers, composers, and librettists were society’s biggest celebrities. Some do break through. Pavarotti, who played Rudolfo in this production of La Bohème, enjoyed as much fame throughout his career as any figure in modern times.

But individual names, no matter how glorious, do not make a masterpiece. Opera is powerful because of the way it combines drama with music, dance, and the visual arts. Richard Wagner in the nineteenth century wrote as well as anybody about the literary, aesthetic, and conceptual ingredients of opera. Yet audiences from Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 1607 to the recent Broadway hit Hamilton have not needed such essays to tell them that joining drama with music is a good idea.

When I started writing, I intended to narrate the story of how I came to love opera (some of you know it from the unit on opera in our signature course Discovering Music). That story, though, deserves its own essay. Suffice it to say that a magnificent piano teacher named Clifton Matthews saw my reluctance (read “ignorance”) and did what all such wise teachers do: plopped me right into the thing I dreaded by assigning me as an accompanist for the opera studio! After one rehearsal, I was hooked.

So this is the end of my story today, but it also bespeaks new beginnings. Look at how many of us are doing things we could not have predicted two months ago. One of my friends, whose ultra-busy professional life meant she rarely cooked at home, is deep in her kitchen experiencing a surprising amount of joy. People who have lived next door to each other for two (or twenty!) years now chat across fences and run errands for one another. Parents with little idea of what their teens studied at school are gaining an insight, for better or worse, and responding in ways they might not have expected. Those same teens are finding out what it means to be properly rested, getting more sleep than they have since they were toddlers taking naps. In some cases, this is making them nicer people. These are good things.

But this odd and limiting time is loosening. We thirst mightily for a restoration of the wholeness of life and work. Soon life will move into more regular patterns. Let us hope that the good things we have discovered (including opera) will stay with us and continue to edify our lives.

* If you missed the talk on La Cenerentola, you can find the recording here.