Oddly enough, Cosi Fan Tutte was the first opera I saw--purely by chance, forI didn't feeling like sticking around the house with my younger brother and the bab

Oddly enough, Cosi Fan Tutte was the first opera I saw--purely by chance, forI didn't feeling like sticking around the house with my younger brother and the babysitter, and tickets were cheap enough at a college production. I agree entirely about starting with Mozart. I prefer the soprano arias in The Marriage of Figaro to pretty much anything else in opera, and Figaro's arias are outstanding too. "Amadeus" is OK if you don't imagine that it has any particular relation to reality. A friend with an interest in musical history got out of the theater and said, "Well, where should I start?", i.e. to enumerate the absurdities.