Blame it on Maria Callas; or How I Met My Husband

It was all Maria Callas’s fault.

I never paid much attention to opera before I happened to catch a PBS program about Callas one rainy afternoon when I was putting off working on my thesis. She happened to be singing the “Habañera” from Bizet’s Carmen, one of the few pieces of opera I, and almost anyone born in the Western Hemisphere, know.

The picture was grainy black-and-white, and, as it was a concert film, there was no set, no costumes; just Callas standing in front of an orchestra, singing. I was mesmerized. I kept watching, clip after clip.

She had me at Tosca.

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In those few minutes, I first realized what an incredibly
I fell in love with Wagner and my husband at the same time.expressive instrument the human voice can be. The gorgeous scores, the orchestra, the gown, the diamonds—all were minor distractions, really. It was Callas’s voice that carried in it the breadth of human emotion—longing, ecstasy, grief. Who knew that transfiguration could come from the movement of air across a pair of membranes?

Opera is how I met my husband, but we didn’t meet at the opera.  My cousin, an inveterate match-maker, told me about a guy she worked with who was smart, cute, single, and liked opera. She was fairly new to San Francisco, so I figured she probably just didn’t realize the guy was gay. As it turned out, I was quite wrong. World’s Best Husband (WBH) was an intellectually curious guy, who had gotten into opera because he wanted to check out a musical form he’d never experienced.

Img. courtesy San Francisco Opera/Cory Weaver

I fell in love with Wagner and my husband at the same time. San Francisco Opera happened to be doing the Ring cycle shortly after we started dating. Just as Siegfried was finding out what a woman Brunhilde was, I was finding out what a mensch WBH was. Wagner’s music was the soundtrack to our courtship. To this day, I can’t hear the overture to Tannhäuser without getting all hot and bothered.

Since then, we’ve been to lots and lots of opera. I can measure our marriage in a sampling of repertoire:

• Year 1: A Streetcar Named Desire (Previn)
• Year 2: Don Giovanni (Mozart)
• Year 3: Dead Man Walking (Heggie)
• Year 4: Die Meistersinger (Wagner)
• Year 5: Alcina (Handel)
• Year 6: Don Carlos (Verdi)
• Year 7: Così fan tutte (Mozart)
• Year 8: The Year we Missed the Season
• Year 9: Ariodante (Handel)
• Year 10: The Bonesetter’s Daughter (Wallace)

Now, in the tenth year of our marriage, the SF Opera has begun a new Ring cycle—an opportunity to fall in love all over again, with Wagner and my husband.