For the sake of making sure everyone get a shot at my giveaway of three paperback copies of When the Angels Left the Old Country, you get one more newsletter reminder to submit a Google form entry HERE, before I announce the winners next week.

So. I’ve been getting into opera.

There were warning signs last year: I went to Tosca when visiting Dallas to see a friend, and then got cheap tickets to Il Trovatore when in New York (pretty much solely on the basis that it was something I could afford to do on a Monday night and going to the Lincoln Center makes me feel fancy.) In June, I hit up the Met again for Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, which, aside from being gorgeously staged, had some rather timely questions to ask about the responsibility of good men to put away their nicer scruples to interfere with evil at any cost.

Ahem. Cough.

And then. In October. I got a record player.

To be perfectly honest, I doubt it would have occurred to me that I could buy operas to listen to in this format if my local record store hadn’t had a 3-record box set (Angel Records, 1960) of Don Giovanni (Mozart, 1787) for $3. But they did, and suddenly a whole new world opened up before me. Because it turns out that eBay has got pretty much any opera you’ve ever heard on vinyl for $15 or less including shipping.

Here is a true fact: a large number of operas (maybe even most operas) are available for free and in their entirety to listen to on Youtube. For example, here are three different full recordings of the aforementioned Don Giovanni: one two three. (And that last one is even the same recording as the box set I acquired!) There is simply no reason for someone who already pays for internet to also pay $15 for a recording of an opera.

What can I say: I find things easier to commit to when they are singular objects which I can hold, as opposed to a shifting point in an endless sea of data. (Buying a three-record set also opens one up to a creative re-imagining of the performance when one doesn’t notice that the records are pressed to be used with an autochanger, with 1→2→3 across the A sides and 4→5→6 across the B sides.)

“Horizontal on the couch with a blanket over my head” is in fact the ideal position from which to appreciate Mozart, and indeed Verdi and Rossini, and getting up every twenty-five minutes to flip the record suits my attention span. So much so that even though I had quite enjoyed Il Trovatore when seeing it at the Met, I was astonished by much more I liked it when listening to it on my couch. Manrico’s aria in the second half particularly startled me, because, well, I may have been asleep by the time he came back on to sing that in the theater. OPERAS SHOULD NOT START AT EIGHT PM.

So far, I have acquired and listened to Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Il Trovatore, and The Barber of Seville twice each, whilst (mostly) cheerfully ignoring the beautifully printed libretto included in box. I feel quite justified in doing this for Il Trovatore (Verdi, 1853), which has a nonsense plot with multiple cycles of poorly-executed revenge; I feel a little bad for missing all the jokes in Seville. In fact, I have now re-listened to just the first side of Seville multiple times now for the ouverture and the first arias (you know all this music if you’ve ever encountered the 1950 Bugs Bunny classic, “Rabbit of Seville,” which for some reason my family had on VHS and viewed repeatedly during my childhood.)

I’m not sure why I’m doing this, except that it’s fun and I don’t know anything about it and don’t feel any particular pressure to be a sophisticated or insightful consumer of opera. Any time I mention opera, my mother feels an uncontrollable urge to remind me of the time she took me to a touring opera production in elementary school and spent the entirety of the two-hour run time trying to remove my fingers from my ears, because I found the noise the soprano was making excruciating. (Which, aside to Mom if you’re reading this: feel free to retire that story!)

And the truth is: I still find a tenor or baritone voice easier to listen to than many sopranos. A lot of the Angel recordings feature coloratura soprano Maria Callas in a starring role, who is one of the only opera singers I’d heard of before starting this little adventure (though, perhaps not so intuitively, via comedian Matteo Lane.) She apparently had splendid technical control and expressiveness (and was very beautiful and personally compelling, which certainly had to do with her mystique). And her voice is — uh — well, it was something of a relief to google her and find out that I’m probably not the only one who sometimes turns down the volume when it’s time for her to do an aria.

By contrast, the bit in the beginning of his opera where Don Giovanni murders the Commendatore is just very beautiful and easy to listen to (kind of weird when you figure out what they’re singing about, to be perfectly honest!)

I suspect I am a philistine, and I suspect these operas are meant for people with more musical education and patience than I have (as well as folks who actually speak Italian or who take the trouble to follow along in the libretto while listening). However, no one at eBay is checking before they mail me my box sets.

On deck, waiting for me to listen to them, I have records of Aida (Verdi 1871 Angel Records 1967), Cosi Fan Tutte (Mozart 1780 Angel Records 1963), Carmen (Bizet 1875 Angel Records 1964), and Rigoletto (Verdi 1851 Angel Records 1956.) (The links are not, in this case, to the recordings I have, but full recordings nonetheless.)

The other musical frontier I am cautiously broaching of late comes courtesy of one of my Black & Pink penpals. Black & Pink is an organization which connects incarcerated queer and HIV+ people with folks on the outside who want to exchange letters. I’ve been involved in my group for about four years. Recently we had a new penpal start corresponding with us, who had a bunch of merengue, bachata, and salsa artists to recommend to me. So far the one I am enjoying most is merengue accordionist Fefita la Grande, who, according to Wikipedia, is the best-known female performer of merengue tipico, the rural version of one the Dominican Republic’s major musical styles.

This is also of interest to me because my younger coworkers usually play reggaeton on the big speaker after we close for the night and start stocking. Reggaeton is interconnected with all of these older genres of Latin music in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. On the obvious end, Bad Bunny, a favorite on the nighttime speaker, samples a lot of older Puerto Rican music on his most recent album, Debí tirar más fotos, including on my favorite track, NUEVAYoL. That song opens with a section of Un Verano en Nueva York, a 1975 song by El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico. (You may notice a theme which carries over from last week’s newsletter.)

(Outside of work, I am only an occasional listener of reggaeton, but I am here to tell you that at the end of a long day, when you are gray with exhaustion and ready to lay face-down on the floor rather than do one single more task, Tití Me Preguntó absolutely whips ass.)

Music is a thing I sometimes avoid conversations about, because I’m embarrassed about my tastes (childish, often saccharine, always uncool) and my lack of knowledge. (Bad Bunny is the second most-streamed artist on Spotify after Taylor Swift, y’all, and I’ve just now started poking about in his discography.) I most often listen to music not for its own merits, but in an attempt to shield myself from a world which is too loud, too irritating, too mentally invasive. I would guess I’ve technically heard the Brandenburg Concertos a couple hundred times, but 99% of those were hunched over a book in the break room, trying to ignore the sound of other people chewing.

So that, perhaps, is a basic truth about me: I’m never going to impress anyone with my musical tastes or knowledge.

But maybe the point isn’t to impress anyone. Maybe it is (for one moment, in this one small corner of my life) enough to be deeply foolish and deeply curious.

Wow. That’s cool. I’ve never heard that before. What’s it called?

Question for the week: What’s the most memorable music you’ve ever been recommended by someone else? What’s the most surprising music you’ve found yourself enjoying?