When I was 12, I discovered I could sing. Not like the next American Idol. Like an opera diva.

I also discovered opera at the same time. My mother liked to take jaunts up to Rochester and poke around Borders Books and Music. It was there that I found cheap opera highlights cassette tapes. I think I started with Mozart’s operas. Then I bought La Traviata, starring Joan Sutherland.

I popped it in and listened. Sutherland started singing Violetta’s first act aria and I was rooted to the floor, transfixed. I remember standing very still in front of my bedroom window, staring out at the gray trees.

There is Sutherland’s voice, a miracle of effortless flexibility. In the opera world, she is a coloratura soprano, which is the highest voice with additional ability to sing through notes very fast. She makes it sound easy. It isn’t.

The next revelation is the brilliance of Verdi’s music. It mirrors every dramatic turn perfectly. The story is of Violetta Valery, a courtesan, who revels in the freedom of her life and the affections of many men. In the first act, she is hosting a party, and Alfredo, an admirer, is a guest. After “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici”, a brindisi (drinking song), Violetta feels faint and sends her guests away. Alfredo comes in and voices his love for her. Violetta is resistant, then starts reflecting on how strange it is that he loves her, though her heart is responding. She ponders “Ah, fors’è lui” in hesitant brief descending notes, then jumps up expressively in ” che l’anima solinga ne’ tumulti”. (Approximately, he has stirred her lonely soul.) After the questioning, her heart surrenders and she expansively proclaims “A quel l’amor, quel l’amor ch’e palpito, del l’universo, del l’universo intero”. (That love, that love, which is the pulse of the universe, the whole universe.) The contrast of the questioning recitative and the flooding lyricism of what follows is breathtaking.

Can you see why I love this music? Listening to it brings me to tears. Singing it is otherworldly. Sometimes I feel like I am not in my body while doing it. I am blessed to immerse myself in such beauty.

Then the best part comes: The jaw-dropping fantastic fireworks of an aria, “Sempre libera” (Always free). Violetta is all over the scale in a flurry of notes, proclaiming freedom to be her own woman. This is the part which is hard with a capital H. Whenever I attempt this, I am breathless at the end. It is pure exhilaration, but I don’t sing it often. It’s like a high school hurdler attempting to reach an Olympic record. Maybe I’ll master it by the time I am…oh, let’s see…forty.

But opera is nothing without spontaneous love and inner turmoil. And interpersonal conflicts. In the second act, Violetta and Alfredo are happily enraptured in domestic bliss in a country house. Violetta receives a party invitation, but has no intention of going back to her past. Alfredo’s father Germont arrives and asks Violetta to sacrifice her relationship (remember, she is a courtesan) for the well-being of his daughter’s engagement. Violetta pleads and protests, but finally acquiesces to Germont’s convincing. She leaves, and Alfredo comes in, seeing the invitation. He thinks Violetta has left him for another man. In the next scene, at the party, Alfredo denounces Violetta, throwing his gambling winnings at her.

In the last act, Violetta is dying. We see glimpses of this earlier in the opera in small coughs and faints. She has been suffering from tuberculosis, though she strives not to reveal it. She reads aloud a letter in which Alfredo has found out about her sacrifice and is on his way to see her. But she feels it is all too late, and mourns it in the aria “Addio del passato”. Verdi composes her poignancy perfectly. The notes in the opening phrases are closely knit, for she doesn’t have the strength to sing beyond them. Her voice rises when she thinks of Alfredo and she breaks into strong lyricism again. The next phrases, a repeated pattern of the opening ones, are tonally sharper as she reaches out to God, ending on a climactic high note. But the high note is only A, none of the runs of high Cs and D-flats in the first act. Violetta is fading. Alfredo comes in, and they sing a loving duet, hoping to leave Paris forever. It is not meant to be. In her last moments, she feels a surge of strength and joy, ending on an expired high B-flat. Then she dies.

Perhaps opera is for the romantic and sentimental. But in a masterwork like this, an entire range of emotions and colors come together to create art that is unforgettable and undeniable. The burst of first romance and curtained fall of final tragedy. Love and death. That is what opera is about. And what life is about. Opera takes all of life’s basic elements and squishes them together into three hours. You may not believe it, but you will definitely feel it.

My opera is La Traviata. It has always been La Traviata. Violetta is a woman of apparent frivolity and selfishness, but deep down she is lonely. When a man comes along and pursues her for more than her beauty and charms, she lets go. She lets go again in her sacrifice. She purely loves Alfredo, but he does not see that until the end. Then it is too late. We are not only left weeping for her, but for him also.

Last year in March, I was in a plane over the Nevada mountains, contemplating my future with D. I truly love him and will always feel that way. But I have to consider myself. I am a free spirit who still needs to know things on my own. When I was in that plane, pondering those mysterious mountains, I felt a yearning twinge, weighing settling into a life with him vs. what I still needed to find out for myself. D is my Alfredo, but I need my freedom at this point in my life. The freedom of self-knowing. This may bring me back to loving again. Then it will resonate through everything I have learned. I am Violetta again in Act 1, exuberant with freedom and independence. I am now looking forward to my future. But my heart has been marked by something beautiful, painful, profound, extraordinary, and haunting. It is that love which is the pulse of the universe.

I am making a champagne granita for my own brindisi. It is finally spring, and it’s time to toast to the new leaving the old behind.

You basically make a granita by combining a base of water and sugar, dissolving the sugar into the water as it heats. (It is ridiculously easy. I sourced the basics from here.) Then it is boiled and cooled. I used ½ cup of sugar to 1 cup of water. After it’s cooled to room temperature, I mixed in 3 cups of ½ blush champagne and ½ passionfruit cocktail.

I dumped it all into a lasagna pan and placed it in the freezer. It nestled nicely on top of our pile of peaches from last year’s tree. (Don’t get my dad started on all those peaches.)

Every 40 minutes or so, I mixed it with a slotted spoon. It should freeze to the point where all of the liquid is incorporated, but still of a slushie-like texture.

I scooped some out and enjoyed it on the deck in the sunshine, my gaze flickering out over the bare gray trees. Libiamo indeed.