Bingo, Homeless! Live music is best.

I've found that most people who say they hate opera have never actually gone to one live. They tend to hear what, to them, is an unfamiliar style of singing in a language they don't understand, don't immediately grasp what's going on, and dismiss the whole thing as ridiculous without knowing anything about it.. Add to this a few parodies or cartoon stereotypes (e.g., the rotund soprano in the iron brassiere—the legendary "fat lady"), and they think they know what it's all about. That's like someone seeing some comic come on stage wearing bib overalls, carrying a banjo, and singing something about "possum up a gum stump" in a Mortimer Snerd voice and concluding that they know all about folk music.

Since opera is usually sung in the original language (Italian, French, German, Russian, etc.) it helps to know what's actually going on. The recent use of "supratitles" (like movie subtitles projected at the top of the stage) helps some, but I tend to find it distracts me a bit from what's going on on stage.

When I was a teen-ager, an older friend of mine got interested in opera, went to a voice teacher, learned he had a potentially good tenor voice, and went kinda nuts. Up until that time, I was sure that opera was "sumpthin' stupid," but he exposed me to a lot of it and got me interested. I spent a lot of time listening to records and reading along in the libretto (a little booklet that comes with a record set—two columns, original language on one side, English translation on the other), so I learned the plots and could follow what they were singing. The first opera I ever saw live (La Bohème), I knew the story ahead of time and was very familiar with the music, so it was like diving into warm water. Made me an addict ever since.

My particular choice for my own performing is folk music. But I love opera. People talk about how dumb some of the opera plots are, but if one were to compare them with the plots of many of the classic Child ballads, one couldn't help but notice the strong parallels. I consider opera to be ballads on steroids. Ballads? Mini-operas.

Example: Boy and girl fall in love. Boy has to go away for a while, girl promises to wait for him. Girl's father considers boy unsuitable. Forces her into a marriage with a rich man. The girl dies. The boy returns the same day, but it's too late. He dies. Pretty ridiculous plot, huh?
Ballad:—Anachie Gordon. Opera:— Lucia di Lammermoor.

Don Firth