Spoiler alert: It works best if you hate it first.
I was lucky as a child. My old grammar school taught along the lines of the ancient Roman method—the quadrivium:
Arithmetic – numbers on a line.
Geometry – numbers on a flat plane.
Music – numbers as sounds in space.
Astronomy – numbers as orbitals in space.
On top of that, my mother had a wonderful voice and spent her days singing show tunes, so I grew up with pitch. We learned music as math. For years we copied quarter notes, half notes, and rests onto sheet music. I also belonged to the choir at Our Lady of Victory Basilica, where we absorbed music by osmosis as much as by training.
As kids, we hated it.
We wanted the Beatles and Pink Floyd. But our teachers were old-school. They saw themselves as intellectuals and role models, not union clock-punchers. They knew what they were doing.
My first pop concert was a disaster. The Rolling Stones played a football stadium in Buffalo. The crowd was so drunk they barely noticed when the band took the stage. People were having sex in broad daylight on the infield. Worse, the Stones made it brutally clear they’d rather be anywhere else on that sunny Saturday. I never developed much taste for pop after that.
Yet I still hated opera.
Then serendipity stepped in.
I was in Vienna for a couple of months on unrelated business when I stumbled into the Vienna Film Festival—an enormous outdoor screen set up in front of the Rathaus, ringed by food vendors and beer stands. Think of it as a giant Austrian watch party. I grabbed an Ottakringer, found a seat, and settled in. As the sun went down and the bleachers filled with a thousand people, they screened La Traviata.
I still didn’t like it.
Violetta was miscast, the staging was jarringly contemporary, and nothing felt right. But something nagged at me. From all those years scribbling notes on music paper, I knew intuitively the problem wasn’t the music. This was the Vienna State Opera—home of the world’s best musicians. They don’t do average. A weak conductor or singer would be exiled to musical Elba.
So if the problem was me, I decided I would learn to like it.
The next year I booked two months in Europe and eleven operas.
Fate was kind again. My first stop was Prague—a city I didn’t yet associate with opera. My first performance was Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) at the Estates Theatre, the very house built for Mozart. Even if you hate opera, The Magic Flute is hard to hate. The story is funny and compelling, the Queen of the Night aria is legendary, and the final plot twist is a jaw-dropper.
I had an ulterior motive, too.
I’ve always been borderline ADD—manageable, but annoying. I decided this would be my boot camp for focus. The first thing that struck me was the conductor’s absolute dictatorial power. Every instrument, every singer, every chorus member and supernumerary answered to his baton. In pop music, the track is often just a backdrop for lyrics or a meme. In opera, every note serves the story. And those stories last two, three, even four hours.
I saw The Magic Flute twice that week.
I wasn’t fully converted yet, but I was on the road.
Next came Carmen. The beauty of Bizet’s opera is its emotional rawness—you almost forget it’s sung. Everything hinges on the woman playing the gypsy. The one I saw, Ramona Zaharia, was masterful. Once you watch Carmen wield the power to wreck men with desire, you recognize her in real life. Opera doesn’t just entertain; it distills life’s passions so vividly you feel them in your own chest.
This is when I understood what opera is for. It uses every tool—music, voice, drama, lighting—to make you feel life in all its absurdity and pain. That’s why our stubborn teachers drilled classical music into us. They knew some of us would eventually need it.
After Carmen came Janáček’s Jenůfa, another Czech masterpiece.
A young woman is impregnated by the son of a wealthy man. Fearing disgrace, her stepmother drowns the baby in a frozen lake. The scene where the mother begs the Virgin Mary for forgiveness is gut-wrenching. It doesn’t have a happy ending. Opera isn’t Disney. It’s life, unfiltered.
Then it was back to Vienna.
On the train from Prague I sat across from Australian soprano Eleanor Lyons. After showing me dozens of photos of her conductor husband and children, she gave me a three-hour masterclass on opera. She explained why Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier is sung by a woman (the soprano voice, plus the end of castrati tradition), and painted a picture of the brutal discipline required to become a professional singer. Mozart wasn’t the giggling goofball from Amadeus; he was a supremely disciplined working composer.
The Vienna State Opera itself is a mixed experience.
The performances are world-class, but roughly a third of the seats have obstructed views. I learned to pay extra and sit in the stalls. The crowd is also heavy with tourists who treat it like a checkbox rather than art. Phones come out. The magic suffers.
Still, I saw two unforgettable productions there: La Bohème and Macbeth. Macbeth tested my new focus—it’s long and grueling—but Gerald Finley’s performance in the title role left me gut-punched. Sitting in the fifth row as he died felt visceral. You don’t just watch it; you inhabit it.
I hated the stories of La Bohème and Madam Butterfly on paper, yet the music and performances won me over. Greatness has that effect. You know it when you feel it.
In the end, opera isn’t always likable. It was never meant to be easy listening. But the people who attend regularly aren’t snobs (with the possible exception of La Scala). They’re a small, attentive crowd that catches every nuance. And when everything aligns—story, voices, orchestra, setting—opera can transport you to another plane.
You just have to understand that if you hate it, it’s not opera’s fault.
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