The Cup and the Song

Dmitri Hvorostovsky as di Luna in Verdi's Il Trovatore. Photo by Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera.

I am so excited about my new series La tazza e il cantico. I'm co-writing it with award-winning wine writer Meg Houston Maker, and we're exploring matching up the great operas with wine, so you'll have a chance to learn a bit about both.

Over the past years, the response people have when I tell them I'm an opera singer has changed. The kind of person who used to respond by saying "I've never been to the opera," now sometimes says instead, "oh, I go to the Met HD series, and I love it!" Their tone is often surprised, as if they never thought of going, but now that they are, they love it.

That's a pretty exciting shift, and this series is, in part, inspired by that greater access to these great works, so we'll be syncing up our choices with operas featured in this season's choices in theaters.

We start with Il trovatore. 

For those of us who love opera, it stands at the center of our lives, it's a big part of what we use to sustain and enrich our lives. And I imagine the same is true for wine and wine lovers. I never like the idea of the arts as a side dish, the first thing on the chopping block when budgets are tightened. And I loved thinking about this series. It felt like moving opera into a more central conversation. Wine played a big role in the lives of the great composers, and the audiences they wrote for. I enjoyed learning more about that for this Overview Essay.

The stories of opera are our stories, and I will really try to convey the essence of those stories in a short essay, and Meg will pick the wine, giving us the low-down on it, and how it fits the bill. I'm looking forward to being educated by her.

Tannhäuser is in the pipeline and I can't wait to see what she picks.

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Photo Lisa Houston