Maria-Cristina Necula chronicles how she found her voice in more than one artistic endeavor.
She remembers the exact day she decided to become an opera singer. Born in Romania and raised in the communist state’s “cosmos of oppression,” Maria-Cristina Necula found one bright light during that time: attending opera performances with her mother.
Her father, a respected professor of electronics and telecommunications at the Polytechnic University, had already made the decision to defect and was working behind the scenes to reunite the family in the United States. Despite their family’s grim predicament, Necula found the one thing to give her a goal, and a sense of hope and optimism.
An Aspiration Is Ignited
“The 15th of May 1985,” she writes in her memoir, “The Voice Beneath the Quince Tree,” “We were going to the opera.” Her mother, a professor herself and an opera fan, took 10-year-old Necula to see “The Marriage of Figaro” at the Bucharest National Opera House. She recalls the arrival at the light-gray building, its architecture, the marble floor, the arches, and carpeted staircase. Three years earlier she’d watched opera on the family TV and ran from the room laughing from sounds that to her were like “screaming beyond the edge of screaming.” Now she was enraptured by this new world. She felt like a grown-up in an audience of adults. As the opera played on, Necula “sat on the edge of [her] seat, mouth open, and shaping the sounds [she] heard from the stage.” On the trolley bus home, she exclaimed, “I’m gonna be an opera singer.”
