Three Arias, Three Backstories: Jazmine Saunders at NCO
Last February at Opera à la Carte, soprano Jazmine Saunders brought three of opera's best-loved heroines to our stage. Gilda is a sheltered teenager in love with a man who has lied to her about his name. Violetta is a Paris courtesan trying to talk herself out of falling in love at all. And Musetta is a flirt who brings an entire café to a standstill just to make her ex-boyfriend jealous.
Each of their arias comes with a backstory at least as good as the music — a censored king, an opening-night disaster, and a piece of music originally written for a warship. You can hear all three below, just as Jazmine sang them with NCO. She's also a good preview of what's ahead: the four soloists joining us for the 2027 Season come from the same world of top competitions, conservatories, and major stages, and you'll meet them at the end of this post.
2027 Season Passes Now On Sale
Buy Your Season Pass Today!
Meet Jazmine Saunders
Jazmine grew up in Rochester, New York, and studied voice at the Eastman School of Music, where she held the William Warfield Scholarship. That name carries a nice echo: Warfield was also a Rochester kid and an Eastman graduate, and he went on to become one of the most celebrated Porgys of the twentieth century. Last Season, Jazmine made her own role debut in Porgy and Bess — as Clara, singing "Summertime" — on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
After a master's degree at Juilliard as a Kovner Fellow, she joined the Met's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, the company's training ground for the singers it expects to build its future around. She made her Met debut as Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro, and earlier this year Classic FM named her one of its 2026 Rising Stars, thirty musicians under thirty, citing her "luminous tone." "Caro nome" isn't a party piece for her, either: she has sung the full role of Gilda on stage at Finger Lakes Opera.
She's a busy woman this fall. As you read this, she's back at the Met in Verdi's Macbeth, and in December she'll be Papagena in the Met's holiday Magic Flute — the same opera whose overture NCO played this past March.
"Caro nome": A Love Song to a Name That Doesn't Exist
The opera, Rigoletto, nearly didn't happen. Verdi based it on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse, which had been banned in Paris after a single performance for showing a French king as a serial seducer. When Verdi brought the story to Venice in 1851, the Austrian censor called it "repugnant immorality and obscene triviality" and refused it outright. The fix was a relocation: the king became a nameless Duke of Mantua, the jester, Triboulet, became Rigoletto, and the working title, La maledizione ("The Curse"), was quietly dropped.
Gilda is Rigoletto's daughter, kept hidden from the world and allowed out of the house only to go to church. That's where she's noticed a handsome young man, and in Act I he slips into her garden and tells her he's a poor student named Gualtier Maldè. He's actually the Duke, the most practiced womanizer in Mantua. After he leaves, Gilda sings "Caro nome" — "Dear name" — lingering over those two made-up words as if she were memorizing them.
Listen for how Verdi writes her breathlessness: the phrases are broken up by little rests, the flutes flutter around her, and the ornaments sound like someone who can't quite sit still. At the end she climbs the stairs to her room still murmuring the name, her voice fading into a long trill — while down in the street, the Duke's courtiers are gathering to kidnap her. In one of opera's cruelest twists, they blindfold Rigoletto and trick him into holding the ladder.
One more Rigoletto story, because it's too good to leave out: Verdi was so worried that the Duke's big tune, "La donna è mobile," would leak before opening night that he gave the tenor the music only a few days before the premiere and made him swear not to sing or even whistle it outside rehearsal. The morning after the premiere, gondoliers were singing it all over Venice.
"Caro nome" as sung by Jazmine Saunders with the Naples Community Orchestra on February 21, 2026
"Sempre libera": The Night the Audience Laughed
Jazmine's second aria came from La traviata, Verdi's story of Violetta, a Paris courtesan who falls in love against her own better judgment. The character was lifted from a play by Alexandre Dumas fils, and Dumas was writing from experience. Violetta is a thinly disguised Marie Duplessis, the most sought-after courtesan in 1840s Paris, who had been Dumas's lover for about a year, reportedly caught the eye of Franz Liszt, and died of tuberculosis in 1847 at twenty-three. Verdi saw the play in Paris with his companion, the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi — the two were living together unmarried at the time, which gave the story some personal sting.
The 1853 premiere at Venice's La Fenice was a disaster. Verdi's soprano, Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, was thirty-eight and, by contemporary accounts, too robust to be believed as a young woman wasting away from consumption, and the audience let everyone know it. Verdi's note to a friend the next day is a masterpiece of understatement: "La traviata last night a failure. Was the fault mine or the singers'? Time will tell." Time told fairly quickly. A revised production a year later, in a different Venice theater with a different soprano, was a triumph, and Traviata has been one of the most performed operas in the world ever since.
"Sempre libera" ("Always free") closes Act I. Violetta has just heard Alfredo's declaration of love, and she argues herself out of it in a torrent of fast, glittering runs: she's a creature of pleasure, and she intends to stay free. Then, from somewhere outside, she hears Alfredo's voice singing his love theme again — and the aria becomes an argument she's losing in real time.
"Quando m'en vo": The Encore That Began as a Salute to a Battleship
Jazmine's encore, which wasn't printed in the program, was Musetta's Waltz from Puccini's La bohème. Its melody started life somewhere very unlikely. In 1894, Puccini wrote a short piano piece, Piccolo valzer, for a commemorative magazine issue in Genoa marking the presentation of the flag to the Italian battleship Re Umberto. It's hard to imagine a less martial tune. Two years later, needing a showpiece for Musetta in Bohème, he pulled the waltz out of the drawer and gave it words.
In the opera, Musetta sweeps into the Café Momus on the arm of Alcindoro, an elderly admirer who is paying for everything, and spots her ex, the painter Marcello. "Quando m'en vo" ("When I walk out alone") is her pitch to the whole café about how every head turns when she passes — aimed squarely at Marcello, who is trying very hard not to look. Once it works, she fakes a pinching shoe and sends Alcindoro off to the cobbler so she can fall into Marcello's arms.
Puccini wasn't the only composer writing a Bohème at the time. His friend and fellow composer, Ruggero Leoncavallo, was setting the same source, and the two ended up racing each other. Puccini's opened first, in Turin in 1896, with a young Arturo Toscanini conducting. Leoncavallo's followed fifteen months later at La Fenice — the same house where Rigoletto and Traviata had premiered — and has lived in Puccini's shadow ever since.
Jazmine Sings:
Verdi, "È strano, è strano… Follie, follie… Sempre libera" from La traviata, followed by an encore, Puccini, "Quando m'en vo" (Musetta's Waltz) from La bohème
Coming in 2027: Soloists of the Same Caliber
When Jazmine sang with us, she was in the middle of a season on the Met stage. That's the level of artist we look for, and the 2027 Season, Echoes of the Human Spirit, brings more of them to Naples, each backed by an orchestra of professional section leaders playing alongside skilled volunteers and students.
January 30, 2027
Zach Cheong, piano — Eternal Rome: Love, Memory & Empire First Prize winner at the International Chopin Piano Competition in Asia, trained at Curtis and now studying at Juilliard, he plays Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 — the same concerto he performed for his orchestral debut at age nine.
February 20, 2027
Kate Anderson, violin — Romantic Spirits: Fate, Fear & Transcendence And from right here in Naples: a three-time winner of the Music Foundation of Greater Naples scholarship competition and Grand Prize winner of the Naples Philharmonic Concerto Competition, Kate plays the first movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto.
March 20, 2027
Anthony Ratinov, piano — Dreams, Fairy Tales & Faith Second Prize winner at the Busoni International Piano Competition, he arrives three months after his Carnegie Hall recital debut to play Ravel's Piano Concerto in G.
Risa Hokamura, violin — American Soul Silver Medalist at the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, where she played Tchaikovsky with the Indianapolis Symphony under Leonard Slatkin, she closes the season with Barber's Violin Concerto.
Comments