She now has no future.

Or the future looks very different than she had imagined, briefly in the beginning of

the opera, and that sort of a consistent operatic theme, which is that this soprano is happy

for five minutes, and then it's all downhill from there.

Welcome to Aria Code.

I'm Rianne Goodins.

Aria is longing to be connected to other people and the townspeople sensed her loneliness

and they manipulated her.

Every episode, we pull apart one moment from an opera to see how it works, and then we

put it back together so you can hear it in a whole new way.

Today, an Aria that's very special to me, the trees on the mountains from Carlaw Floyd's

Susanna.

There is no way you can listen to that simple song and not since the underlying devastation

of this young woman who is now looking at the rest of her life as a disaster.

Well, it's been a couple of months since we closed out season one.

I've missed you guys, and I'm really excited to be back with this special episode of Aria

Code.

What's so special about it?

Well, we'll get to that, but first, a short journey to the past.

So back in my college days, when I was still doing the opera thing at UNCG in North Carolina,

I got to sing the title role from Carlaw Floyd's first full-length opera, Susanna.

It's one of the three most performed operas by an American composer, and in my humble

...