I grew up with my mother playing the piano, mostly pop music al la Sinatra, Como, Crosby, Dean Martin, with an occasional Chopin thrown in. I played a violin with little expertise in freshman orchestra. I still had no idea Music had labels like “pop” or “jazz” or “classical.
The turning point came in high school. My best friend had a nice singing voice. She kept bugging me to read a book she enjoyed called “Enrico Caruso, His Life and Death” written by Caruso’s widow.. I thought that was about the last thing I would ever want to read, but she kept bugging me and eventually, to please my good friend, I read the book and by the end, I thought Caruso was quite the most wonderful fellow!
About that time I was gifted with my first piece of audio gear, a Webcor Record Player. Our house had only a radio, so this was “A Big Deal”. I immediately rushed to our local record store and as fate would have it, displayed prominently in the window was a 3 LP album with Caruso dressed as Pagliacci the clown on the cover. Talk about fate! Of course I bought the album and being an impoverished teenager it was many weeks before I could afford to buy that next LP. So I listened to those three Caruso LPs over and over and over. I’ve been an opera lover ever since. And I love classical music too.
I lived through the Elvis Presley era, the Beetles era and the rock and roll era, and so on, never tempted to buy anything but classical or opera music. I do occasionally wonder what sort of music I would have gravitated to had I not read the loving biography of Caruso by his widow, or had that particular LP album not been in the window of that store. I can only say that fate decided my choice and I’m very satisfied with the result.