Sonya’s induction into opera came via her father’s living room speakers in Los Angeles, leading to a teenage trip to see the world-famous tenor Plácido Domingo in Carmen. Worlds collided when she realized years later that she had gone to high school with the tenor’s youngest (lookalike) son. After college, she moved to Venice, pouring into the jewel-box theater of La Fenice on pay-what-you-can, under-25 tickets to see La Traviata in the exact room where it debuted and “Callas had held court.”

Now based in New York, her operatic evenings look something like this: a brisk stroll across the park to Lincoln Center, arriving just in time to secure her intermission order of champagne and berries with crème fraîche, to then hopefully be seated in her favorite seat below the Chagall tapestries: “The Lobmeyer chandeliers, the splendor of this room, its faded glamour, truly never gets old. I swoon each time.”

Part of the joy of opera lies in approaching it not as an imposing monolith, but as a living archive of scandal and political zeitgeist! Sonya approaches the repertoire through its epic history: “I’ve read some incredible stories about Verdi’s love life, he was quite the feminist for his time!” and shares the romantic myth of songwriter Lucio Dalla with us: “a great fan of Caruso’s, Dalla booked the same room in the Parco Principe hotel in Sorrento where he died, many years later, to convene with his soul.”