By Ken Ellsworth
February 27, 2005

I'm not being snooty here, but I admit to being a fan of opera. I don't understand why everybody isn't.

For those of you who are still reading, I know most people think of opera as fat people onstage singing in contrived voices about nonsense. While some opera singers are undeniably fat, what they are singing about is almost never nonsense. In fact, it's the opposite - unless our souls are nonsense.

It is the soul that the opera speaks of so eloquently.

I'm not dating anyone right now, but I'm deeply in love with ''The Girl of the Golden West,'' the opera by Giacomo Puccini. I attended the Abilene Opera Association's production of it Tuesday.

I was sitting in the half-filled balcony. The California saloon heroine, Minnie, beautifully portrayed by Patricia Stevens, was singing tenderly early in the first act about the great love that her parents enjoyed throughout their lives and how she longed for such love in her own life.

At that moment, Stevens reached deep into her own soul and produced the most-amazing, powerful and lovely sounds imaginable. The music soared up to the balcony, into my ears and, from there, into my heart, leaving an instant lump in my throat.

''Yes. Yes. Yes!'' I thought - and, more importantly, felt.

My mother died a year ago. She and Dad, who is still living at age 90, were married 60 years. I can't describe in words the wonderfulness of that relationship, the awe with which I regarded it, or the sadness that I feel now that it has ended.

However, in those few notes, with the help of Puccini's genius and a stupendous orchestra, Patricia Stevens as Minnie communicated to me what I had not been able to communicate to myself.

They call it catharsis, or a release of the emotions through art. Catharsis is a most joyful thing. I could hardly stay in my seat.

But the opera went on, providing, incredibly, maybe a dozen similar moments. It was like being whacked repeatedly on the head by beauty. The sounds hung in the air, exquisitely, like white gulls soaring into the cloudy and starry skies of the Paramount Theatre's fanciful ceiling.

The sounds were almost inhuman, but the wonder of it is that the sounds were the product of what is best about humanity.

I'm a big fan of Mark Twain, who was also an opera fan. His books, in fact, have supplied me with several cathartic moments.

In the latter part of his life, he looked at the world and saw the bad parts - how we fight each other and undeniably inflict pain on the innocent. He became bitter and cynical.

In Twain's half-satirical musings, he ranked human beings at the bottom of the animal life ladder, ''except for the French,'' who are lower yet, he added with a mischievous punch line. In his cynicism, I think Twain forgot about opera, forgot that humans are capable of the sublime as well awfulness, that we can produce Puccinis as well as Hitlers.

On Tuesday night at the opera, I concentrated on Puccini and the sublime. On Wednesday, I awoke to the newspaper and news of war, disease and cruelty. But my heart keeps returning to Puccini. He's still soaring around in there.

And so is my new heartthrob, my love - ''The Girl of the Golden West.'' I'm walking on air.

MORE ELLSWORTH COLUMNS »

Copyright 2005, Abilene Reporter News. All Rights Reserved.