Profile

First off, I should say that if you really want to know much about me, my LiveJournal is the best place to check. My rantings say a lot more about me than anything else could. That little disclaimer out there, I'll do my best.

At the time of writing this I am a 21 year old music major, training to be an opera singer. I'm a lyric soprano and I'd like to specialize in late 19th C. opera, specifically the Italian verismo school and their French contemporaries. (for all the technical professional things, like my resume and performance dates, check the professional section) For non-musicians, this means primarily Puccini, Massenet, Charpentier, Mascagni, and similar (maybe Verdi someday, but not now). My two favorite operas are La Boheme and Louise, but there are many many more than that. I'd love to specicialize in French repertoire and be the lyric soprano equivalent to Susan Graham, but I don't like melodie that much, so I have a lot of Puccini and Mozart in my repertoire, just because you have to if you're a lyric.

More relevantly to the content here, I am a European Studies minor and I spend far too much of my free time being a geeky French lit fangirl. I'm a fairly ridiculously huge fan of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, both novel and musical, as the fiction section betrays, and I am immensely fascinated by French history, specifically from the Revolution through the turn of the 20th C. I do speak semi-fluent French, and I have read much of my research material, fiction and otherwise, in the original French.

Generally speaking, my favorite period of history is from roughly 1830 to 1900. I am fully aware of how geeky the fact that I can pinpoint a favorite historical period makes me. Aside from French history of the period, I love contemporaneous Polish and Austrian history. Vienna in the 1890s is one of the places I would love to have been able to see, not in small part due to James Michener's novel Poland (the only one of his novels I liked for the record).

Musical theatre is what originally got me interested in being a performer, and I am still an avid theatre-goer. I'm always up for a good musical comedy, but I tend to be a bigger fan of the more dramatic stuff. Sondheim is hands down my favorite theatrical composer, but Boublil and Schonberg, Jason Robert Brown, and Michael John LaChiusa are high up on my list as well. The Phantom of the Opera in San Francisco was the first full fledged professional musical I ever saw live, and I still have a soft spot for the show, crazy Phans, flaws and all. I have a penchant for falling in love with shows that die untimely deaths, like Martin Guerre and Jane Eyre.

I have a horribly snarky sense of humor, and I use it on any innocent victim that crosses my path, often unknowingly. I'm an ENTJ according to the Myers-Briggs indicator, and a Scorpio with an Aries rising, which basically makes me a know-it-all bitch. I have a feeling I may be the reason the term "schadenfreude" was invented.

Questions, comments, concerns? Direct them to the complaint division.