A scene from “Le Nozze di Figaro” at the Metropolitan Opera. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

This is the opening week of the 2014-2015 season at the Metropolitan Opera. I’d been looking forward to last night’s premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro for a few months, pretty much since the last season closed in June. I rushed home in order to listen to the pre-show commentary on SiriusXM’s Met Opera Radio, the National Anthem, and then, the opening notes of what has been my favorite opera for many years.

“This is very, very important.”

For just over a year now, I’ve taken great joy in listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts throughout the season on SiriusXM.  It has become my sport, complete with commentary which seems to say “This is very, very important. Opera is very, very cool.” I first became aware of the MetOpera channel when we got a car with a satellite-equipped stereo. The Met is a premium channel, not available on the basic subscription, and I would check every once in a while to see if we were in a special period where all channels are available to all users. During those times, I would listen to as much as I could, until they turned off my permission to the content, likewise, whenever we drove a rental car that was equipped. Eventually, I decided it would be worth it to me to increase our subscription level to get access to the channel both in the car and online. It has changed my life dramatically. Here’s why.

Goals Attainable by Definition

Some twenty years ago, I dreamed of being on the Metropolitan Opera stage. I realize now that there was no period in my life in which I was training at a pace that was appropriate to get me to that goal, so it’s probably good that I got diverted! My mom asked me this week whether I wish I was singing there now. My response was that I certainly wish I had the $200k salary that even a member of the chorus gets. I would’ve loved it, at one time, but now I feel that this was not unlike the daydreams of a child hoping to be a baseball player or president of the United States, all goals attainable by definition, but set aside for those who can survive the lead-in. I’ve made choices that put me on a very different path.

Back when I was in that dreamy phase, I would devour opera, listening, studying scores, reading biographies and plot synopses. I’d plan my Saturday afternoons around the Met’s matinee broadcasts, and supported the Met in order to gain access to their print publications and brochures, all suitable for dorm room wall hanging. These were my pinups, a nascent vision board. Morris and Ramey, my heroes; Bartoli and Fleming, my crushes.

Hearing Overtakes Listening

And then something happened. Life. Over time, I lost the freedom to schedule afternoons around matinee broadcasts. I graduated, thrice, removing my need to practice daily, as I clearly was not on a trajectory to solidify my position as a career singer. My musical interests moved more toward conducting and choral music, and the opera titans moved a bit offstage.

There were still occasional interjections of that previous life, but I guess I came to think it just wasn’t as important as it had been before. But, amazingly, that life came back to me when the reverse was happening. I had inadvertently resigned myself, more or less, to hearing pop music in the background, a life nearly void of critical, active listening, until 2012, when I began to turn that around. By “forcing” myself to listen to more classical music, symphonies, specifically, in that first year, I gradually was reminded how much more complex classical music is than the (exceedingly fun, don’t get me wrong) New Wave tunes that had most recently been featured in my epic commute binge-listens. Over these few years, I’ve come back around to a feeling I had in the 1990s.

When I was a kid, 1980s-me listened to pop tunes like everyone else. Madonna, Michael Jackson, New Kids on the Block, Tiffany, whoever was popular at the time. Then, at the pivotal moment I’ve referenced many times, I turned on a dime, drawn exclusively to classical and choral music. To this day, I have no first-person nostalgia for 1990s music, because I removed myself from it as completely as was possible. Nowadays, I’ll hear a band like the Cranberries, and where my contemporaries will remember their first kiss or that term paper they forgot to write, I have this strange feeling of emptiness, a “nostalgia for things not experienced”. Or, I listen to “Bittersweet Symphony” and swear it’s the greatest song ever written, while my friends have still not recovered from its burn rotation decades ago.

There was a composer/philosopher from the Florentine Camerata days (I am unable to find the quote online right now) who said something to the effect that any music written before say, 10 years prior, had no more value. In the 1990s I proudly took up the anti-argument, stating that there was no music written in the previous x years that had value. I cared only for the music of the distant past. Well, that was a pretty dumb thing to say, but dumb kids say dumb things. I reference it now, only as a way of expressing that I’ve come around now to, once more, see far greater value in the music of the masters, but not because I think it’s the only path. Popular music certainly has its place for a large majority of the world, including myself at specific times and locations. But, since taking on such a breadth of new, old music in the past three years, and since adopting the meditative practice of listening to multiple concurrent musical lines, I’ve found there is not much to be offered outside of art music. It’s not that I am critical of less complex music in the way I had been long ago, it’s just that I don’t like it as much anymore.

The New Vanguard

So, I’ve come around again to heralding particular opera singers as my favorites, trying to get a listen whenever they might appear on the radio, online, or on PBS. But, this time around, through older, more settled eyes, I see them less as a cultural vanguard, perched atop Valhalla, dipping to earth only to allow the hem of their robes to be touched by us mortals. Instead, I look at these people with incredible amounts of respect and admiration, for they were the ones who had not only the raw talent, but the discipline and drive to follow their dreams at all costs, to miss their families, pack suitcases, and preserve the art. A few of my former classmates have sung on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and are revealing that discipline and drive nightly on other stages around the world. These are the new vanguard, willing to look at the financial state of the industry and the world at large, raise their chin, utter “Meh!”, and move ahead to do their part, chasing after the shadows of thousands before them. I didn’t have what it takes, but I benefit everyday from the work of those who did.