The Microphone and Opera Singers

I'm new to classical music. My introduction was through Amira. After discovering her I was eager to learn all I could so I could follow her career. 

At first I enthusiastically approached people who claimed to be opera experts, but soon learned that many of these people suffer from some kind of mental condition. They say things that are mean to be mean and, I quickly learned, patently false. I can understand someone saying Amira isn't technically an opera singer, as she has not performed in a full opera in an opera hall. 

However, one man insisted she was not a soprano, then stated that a soprano was just a person with a very high voice. So Micky Mouse is a soprano. 

There are a lot of false memes these phony opera experts repeat. One is that a person has to go to a conservatory to be an opera singer. That excludes Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli since neither of them did. 

Another is that Amira will only be an opera singer when she "gives up the microphone." I lost count of the times I heard these exact words -- give up the microphone. Opera singers, you see, never use a microphone. 

The problem with this is that all opera singers use microphones when they are in an open or large venue, and obviously they do when they record. 

This stupid idea that if a person is using a microphone they cannot be an opera singer is so stupid I don't know what to say. 

Real experts tell me that they cheat in modern opera houses, and have hidden microphones all around the stage. 

I expected people who claim to be attracted to something as supposedly refined as opera to be smart. I was not expecting to find that opera is a dying 19th century art form that attracts hipsters and wannabes, who don't really know anything about the real world but want to appear genteel.

Incidentally, I was part of a fan committee that purchased one of the finest opera microphones in the world for Amira. We had to order it from Germany to be shipped to South Africa. It's the same microphone used by Luciano Pavarotti. Sadly Pavarotti died without giving up the microphone. Maybe in his next life he'll be an opera singer. 

Opera houses were designed to place the singer near every seat in the auditorium. That is why they stacked the seats. Essentially no audience member was that far from the singer. 

This would never work in the giant venues used today. For example below is the venue of Pavarotti's final performance in Italy. 

The arenas Amira performs in are of similar grandness. Below she performs before 13,000 people in Maastricht in 2014. Not only are these venues large but they are outdoors. 

Or consider the MAX Proms arena in Utrecht in 2017, where Amira's audience spread before her like an ocean. 

Far from ruining classical music, the invention of the microphone and modern amplification opened up the classical genre to much larger audiences. Gone is the day that 'opera' meant some exclusive club of elites stacked in a tiny hall. We'll leave it to the hipsters to pretend to still live in that world.