Imposing voices singing in foreign languages, long performances in huge theaters, intricate stories loaded with drama: Opera can be intimidating! The good news is that the aspects that might intimidate you at first are the same ones that will win you over when the time and the circumstances are aligned for magic. For me there were four key moments that made me a lifelong opera lover.
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Bizet’s Carmen
I was ten or eleven when the melodies of Carmen first took hold of me. I found a CD on my father’s shelf and played it relentlessly, reading and rereading the libretto in its liner notes until the booklet nearly disintegrated. The text itself is thrilling, but what makes Carmen compelling is the strength of Bizet’s vivid character building through music: Carmen, Don José, Escamillo, and Micaëla. Long before my first live opera, I swear I could see them in my mind, just listening to the CD.
A thrilling story of passion, jealousy, and power set amid a cigar factory and a bullfighting arena, starring gypsies, soldiers, toreadors, and smugglers, Carmen is a masterwork full of orchestral color, vocal exuberance, Spanish-flavored rhythms and melodies your brain will probably store for life, and an ending that never fails to move and even enrage. Let’s watch one of Carmen’s most iconic scenes, here with the celebrated Rolando Villazón and Marina Domashenko in an already legendary production from 2006 conducted by maestro Daniel Barenboim.
Wagner’s Die Walküre
A deeply flawed man, Richard Wagner remains one of the most controversial figures in music history. However fraught his legacy, his importance in the evolution of opera is undeniable, and any opera lover must grapple with that legacy at some point. His ambition and rebellious, sometimes manic nature are present everywhere in a music so powerful and finely crafted that it changed the way I experienced opera forever.
And the perfect way to experience opera, according to Wagner’s ideal of unifying all works of art in a single performance — what he called Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art” or “synthesis of the arts” — is in a spectacular staged production packed with epic singing, like this one from Zurich’s 2024 Ring cycle. Here, fantasy worlds and characters inspired by centuries of myths, legends, literature, and civilization come to life with a roar from the first notes of The Valkyrie. This striking storm scene serves as the prelude to one of the most perfect single acts in all of opera, almost an opera within an opera, where Siegmund and Sieglinde meet and fall in love in defiance of her forced marriage to the brutal Hunding.
Handel’s Hercules
With its lively rhythms, its dramatic vein, its intoxicating fresco-like colors, Baroque music has always been central to my life — not just as my entry point to musical study, but as a lasting source of pleasure ever since. If, like me, you love concertos and sonatas by Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Purcell, or Rameau, the next selection may broaden your view of opera, and perhaps of music as a whole, as it did for me when I watched this very production on medici.tv.
For its many rarities, Handel’s Hercules is as Baroque as it gets. Sung in English, its score is a brilliant blend of Italian and French styles by a German composer established in London after years living in Rome. Its plot is packed to the brim with intrigue: when the long-absent Hercules makes a triumphant homecoming with the beautiful princess Iole as his captive, his wife Dejanira’s obsessive jealousy and fear of abandonment leads to psychological collapse and devastating consequences. Watch a flawless, relentless Joyce DiDonato as Dejanira in her iconic “mad scene,” with the earth-shaking accompaniment of Les Arts Florissants conducted by Baroque legend William Christie!
Verdi’s La Traviata
Any intro to opera is incomplete without an Italian opera, of course! For many listeners, Verdi is the gateway to the genre. And it’s no wonder: he is direct, immediately gripping, and seductive to the ear, yet never simplistic! La Traviata became one of my favorites more recently thanks to my best friend, a soprano herself, who stripped away all clichés and misconceptions, and revealed its core to me. What’s left is pure drama: a nonstop masterpiece of tragic love set to music of extraordinary passion, conveyed through a vehicle of perfect expression supported by perfect technique: the human voice.
Let yourself be carried away by the story of Violetta and Alfredo in this outstanding performance starring Aida Garifullina and Javier Camarena, two of the most exceptional singers of their generation.
