In the Roman amphitheater of Verona, Italy, the elephants and horses in ancient Egyptian regalia marched onto stage to the thunderous chords of Guiseppe Verdi's opera "Aida." The singers filled the balmy night with their voices, soaring over the trumpets and crashing cymbals of the orchestra — and for one girl watching the spectacle it seemed like "a world of dreams."
The other students in the junior high-school music class in snowy Asahikawa, deep in Hokkaido, giggled at the funny men and women making a ruckus in the Blu-ray video playing on the classroom television. But 14-year-old Kano Ozawa found herself spellbound by the costumes and the pageantry and the enormous performers whose naked voices could fill an arena packed with thousands of spectators.
"It shook me to the core," she recalls of her first encounter with opera. "I couldn't make head or tail of it, but I thought, 'This is what I want to do.'"