For this series, we reach out to a member of the department who has a very particular obsession and ask them to share it with the world. In this edition, Professor Dorothy Noyes shares her fascination with opera.

The mature passions begin in parody and pretense. In my case, with the best TV commercial of all time, with a helmeted Elmer Fudd chanting "Kill de wabbit!", and in due course with the Marx Brothers mangling Il Trovatore. Much as I learned about wine by imitating televisual wine snobs, I hooked myself on opera by bellowing "Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!" and improvising scenes of distracted love on the playground. Probably one should not uncover the ignoble beginnings of acquired tastes. But more important things came in the same way, through pretense and iteration: with time, I mastered languages by acting as if I spoke them, acquired political views by trying them out in argument and became a scholar by assembling books and papers around myself. Playing at alien practices gives you power over them, makes an effective investment that builds patience to wrestle with the strange. Massive middle-aged persons in heavy robes roaring of love and vengeance to orchestral accompaniment counted as strange, even in the European court environment that originated them. 

Escape into strangeness is the attraction for opera obsessives. The rising soprano Pretty Yende has explained in interviews that she was caught as a child by the Flower Duet from Lakmé on a British Airways commercial. Any number of performers and listeners have taught themselves how to fly away from bourgeois frustration, heteronormative straitjacketing, political oppression or plain boredom after a powerful first encounter with the sheer beauty or raw emotion that are the competing currencies of operatic singing. Pushing beyond its natural limits of range, breath and volume, the operatic voice breaks through the weight of bodies and staging, an icon of effort. It overcomes the  genre's history, foreignness and social snobbery to assert humanity. Listen to Leontyne Price as Aida, an enslaved Ethiopian in a protofascistic Egypt, singing of the homeland she will never see again.

Opera's exoticism gives its devotees deniability. All that passion and rage, nothing to do with me, not the voice of my generation; it's just convention. This deniability has sometimes been politically important: this isn't about you, our Habsburg rulers of Italy: we're just singing about ancient Babylon. But to my mind, the history of opera as immediate political statement is less interesting than its role in modeling social orders and working out scenarios of their possible functioning. Everyone's favorite example is Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, which stages the humiliation of an abusive aristocrat and the education of a male servant through the energies of a maidservant and the unhappy countess whose cooperation she wins. (The 1988 production by Peter Sellars updated the setting to a penthouse in the new Trump Tower.) This opera, first performed in 1786 amid revolutions, marked a turning point in the genre's orientation from aristocratic to bourgeois values. Mozart's important musical invention was the ensemble finale, in which multiple voices must contest for a hearing and, ideally, construct concord. Good for the days when you despair of the world.  

Theaters and orchestras get bigger along with the power of the state, and the thoughtful composers grow more pessimistic. Verdi's Don Carlos, from 1867, depicts the crushing of liberal impulses of sympathy by the reactionary power of empire as it develops new techniques of mass politics. All of this extends outward from the basic nineteenth-century operatic plot as defined by George Bernard Shaw: the tenor and the soprano want to make love, but the baritone objects. One of the most wrenching scenes in opera depicts Philip II of Spain, recognizing his loveless isolation from wife, son and humanity in general, coming to submit to the rule of the Grand Inquisitor. Slow, heavy bass voices, low strings and low brass depict the musical triumph of political evil.

It isn't healthy to spend too much time in the operatic nineteenth century, and Wagner especially is bad for the cholesterol. Still, he is amazing. As an entry into the Ring Cycle, I recommend the first (short) opera, Das Rheingold. The Bayreuth production by Patrice Chéreau and (again) G.B. Shaw's short introduction, The Perfect Wagnerite, make it clear that the Ring is more about industrial capitalism than about nationalism. For Wagner's hothouse religious eroticism, the easiest starting point is Tannhäuser, preferably sung by Plácido Domingo, who does maddened anguish better than anybody. As a comedown from Wagner's shocking magnification of the intimate, I recommend any of Benjamin Britten's operas, which bring tormented sexuality down to human scale, with great literary sensitivity for his sources.

Don't despair: there is plenty of scope for joy and cynicism. For this, you can go back to the very beginnings of opera. As one scene follows another, Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea (1643) undercuts every noble Roman sentiment it puts forward. The audience was also well aware that the concluding triumph of the ambitious Poppea, who marries Nero and becomes empress, would be short-lived. But here is that ecstatic finale: note that Nero and Poppea's objects of fulfillment are not quite congruent.

In the Baroque period, operatic sexuality was complicated without being conflicted: high voices might be women or castrati or men singing falsetto; young lovers might be sung by any mix of genders; flirtatious old duennas were sung by male tenors; arias were swapped among singers along with costumes and partners. Although the nineteenth century imposes binary gender and bourgeois marriage upon operatic protagonists, this orthodoxy is slow to establish itself, especially in comedy. See this trio from Rossini's Le Comte Ory, when the three quarreling protagonists realize that the Countess's brother is about to return, and they need to make hay while the moon shines. The expressive role of florid singing becomes apparent 9.5 minutes into the clip when sentimental exploration shifts to fast action.

Contemporary operatic productions place high value on convincing theater–singers are much more athletic today than they used to be–and creative direction to trouble the old texts. New operatic creation is making a massive comeback. John Adams, with Peter Sellars, does operas on recent historic events: Doctor Atomic and Nixon in China have been great successes, even in conservative houses like the Met in New York. Smaller companies are specializing in new commissions from women and composers of color addressing contemporary concerns directly: this spring the great Rossini tenor Lawrence Brownlee is performing a new song cycle commissioned in solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and last fall, Opera Philadelphia premiered Daniel Roumain's We Shall Not Be Moved on a 1985 police standoff that destroyed a West Philly neighborhood.

Where to get started? Opera is all over YouTube, both in clips of the greats (Maria Callas, ahem) and complete productions, often with subtitles. It helps to do a little advance reading on the relevant opera and, if you're listening to audio only, to follow along with a libretto (the text set by the composer to music). Bizet's Carmen is an excellent place to start, and the Carmen volume of the Cambridge Opera Handbooks, by feminist musicologist Susan McClary, tells you all you need to know about how the musical exoticism and gender uncertainties of the opera are violently reined in at the conclusion, along with the subaltern heroine herself, by the Western harmonic order.

There are lots of other books. For the interaction of divadom and queer fandom, see Ethan Mordden's Demented (and find the spectacular autobiography of the 1920s icon Mary Garden); for a dense but rich overview by an English professor, see Peter Conrad's Opera: A Song of Love and Death. But handbooks and fan websites abound.

And to hear and see it live? Opera Columbus has been gimmicky but increasingly good lately: Orpheus and Eurydice in April looks promising. On a smaller scale, Opera Project Columbus brings young singers into informal settings around town for beloved Italian red-sauce repertoire. Ohio State's School of Music usually does one opera a year and usually quite well: Bernstein's operetta Candide is coming up in early March. The Metropolitan Opera does live digital transmissions from September through May, shown in Columbus at the Lennox and elsewhere for $20. (Live opera tickets, by the way, are cheaper on average than most concerts and professional athletic events, and there are often student discounts.) You can also get the whole Met digital archive from their website, which gives free access on campus–if you're excited about the current Kentridge show at The Wex, take a look at the productions he designed for Berg's Lulu and Shostakovich's The Nose. The Cleveland Orchestra does semi-staged productions with important video artists about once a year, and the Cincinnati Opera has a short summer season with usually a new contemporary work by Missy Mazzoli or another important younger voice.

Opera is everywhere. Opera is overwhelming. If you need to get your head out of the chatterverse and go cathartic, there is nothing better.

By Dorothy Noyes