A Musical Adventure. Act One, Scene One.

Si je t'aime, prends garde à toi!

Translation: If I fall in love with you, you best watch your ass.

I used to sing every day. I sang in choir in school at various levels, traveled to China to sing in a vocal jazz combo. Beyond hanging around with one of my friends who sang a bit of opera and trying out a few of her arias, I have never been an opera singer.

These days, I find myself not singing nearly as much as I would like that. I've decided that all that is going to change. I'm going to pick up singing again, and I'm going to do it by poking out into a realm of the voice that I have only ever feared and respected. I'm starting with watching a lot of videos of singers doing what they do best. It began with some Mozart, specifically Die Zauberflöte, as my first excursions into opera as a child under the influence of my mother's taste in music. Therein lay vocal acrobatics that I'm fairly certain I will never be able to perform:


I am not so crazy as to jump right in and tell the world how der hölle rache kocht in meinem herzen, but I do want to set for myself a goal that will push me a bit. I just want it to be, y'know. Doable.

And so, the Habanera! Properly, it is called "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" or "Love is a rebellious bird". So, what makes a good Habanera good versus a bad one? I'm not a trained musician, and I don't have the experience an opera critic does. That being said, here is the one I consider to be the best of the bunch:



This is the yardstick by which I measure the other renditions of this aria. Maria Callas, called La Divina by her admirers, of which I am certainly one. She is so expressive - her breaths seem to be little exclamation points in her singing, she pulls out little nuances in the notes that just tug at your heart.

In my wildest dreams, I am half the singer she was. And so I begin to practice.