Twice I remember asking my mother, ``Why are operas always sad?''
She tried no answer, but she was someone to whom I could direct such
a perplexity.  I would come to give myself various answers to the question -
based on questions having to do, for example, with what occasions
people to sing, and what plots best allow for such occasions,
questions which I would later come to feel assumed the question, not
answered it.  I do not know that it is the most searching question one
might ask of opera, but the most interesting directions for an answer
I have been given to it come from another woman, Catherine Clement
in her book ``Opera, or the Undoing of Women,'' published in 1979,
translated into English some ten years later, when I came across it.
Her answer is, in effect, that opera is about the death of women, and
about the singing of women, and can be seen to be about the fact that
women die because they sing.

``A Pitch of Philosophy'' p.132