It’s not a punk anthem or an ‘80s synth classic, or even a pop song. When asked to choose her all-time favourite piece of music, Cyndi Lauper didn’t pick anything by Prince, Bowie, or even herself. Instead, the pop icon went straight a 1904 opera piece from Madama Butterfly – Puccini’s 1904 opera about love, loss and quiet devastation.
Specifically, Lauper singled out “Un bel dì, vedremo” (“One fine day we’ll see”), the soaring soprano aria that has transfixed opera audiences for more than a century. Sung by the doomed Cio-Cio San as she clings to hope that her American husband will return to her in Nagasaki, the aria is one of the most recognisable and heartbreaking in all of opera – with lyrical beauty and inevitable tragedy.
Speaking on Desert Island Discs in March this year, Lauper reflected on her deep, personal connection to the piece – and how her mother’s love for Puccini shaped her childhood.
“Italians, they love Puccini,” she laughed. “And my mother kept playing this stuff, you know. And it was always like, Mom, you know, it doesn’t work out for her in the end. She dies, or it’s not good for her. It’s always bad for the woman.”
But despite the grim fate of its heroine, Lauper can’t help but be drawn to the aria’s raw emotion and complex vocal demands – especially in the hands of one particular soprano.
“She loved this aria from Madame Butterfly, One Fine Day”, Lauper said. “The greatest voice of the century, female to me, one of them, is Maria Callas. And I think she’s extraordinary because of the way she would be loud, and then soft, and then full, and then almost like talking.”
Callas’s 1955 recording of the aria remains one of the best out there, and for Lauper, it’s the combination of technical mastery and personal tragedy that makes it so compelling: “The control, and the beauty, and her story, which was so tragic because her life was like an opera. But her voice was incredible.”
When host Lauren Laverne asked which of her eight musical selections she’d choose to save from the waves, Lauper didn’t hesitate before saying “Oh my gosh. I think that Maria Callas track. Because I don’t think you could ever get tired of listening to all the colours in her voice.”
As for the rest of her Desert Island Discs playlist, Lauper’s tastes were as eclectic as her career. She picked Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and Louis Armstrong’s ‘All That Meat and No Potatoes’.
Marni Nixon’s ‘Getting to Know You’ from The King and I made the cut – a nod to Lauper’s love of musicals – as did The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.
She also included Billie Holiday’s ‘A Sailboat in the Moonlight’, Blondie’s ‘One Way or Another’, and Big Mama Thornton’s raw and rollicking ‘Hound Dog’. She rounded out her choices by selecting the book Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris – an offbeat, funny memoir.