“I fell down the long rabbit hole into the wonderland of music when I was about seven years old. I came across a pile of 78′ records in an unused Victrola (how’s that for a dated word?) and I remember first and foremost the voice of Tito Schipa singing the Cavatina from The Barber of Seville, and I was hooked! From then on music meant mostly singing, and at first mostly Opera. At around the same time, I secretly vowed to be a singer.

Music was the only world to which I could escape from the banality of a lower middle-class existence. In the privacy of my room, I could be an African princess, or a fiery gypsy, or a courtesan with a heart of gold (don’t tell my mum!).

Later, when I began to sing along with the Opera stars, it was my chance to express those blurred, but primordial feelings I had bottled-up inside a thin, nondescript physique.

Little by little, music gave me an identity, all mine, not just somebody’s daughter, sister or niece. Music gave me a profession. It brought me a great love and, when it ended, it filled the void with an incentive to live more fully as a person, not an appendix. It liberated me as a woman, it forged my independence of mind and spirit. Music stimulated my creativity and gave me a sense of confidence and inner serenity.

Music is the air I breathe and the planet I inhabit. The only way I can pay my debt to music is by bringing it to others, with all my love.”

Cathy Berberian, February 1983

These words stand as Cathy’s artistic testament, written just weeks before her passing in Rome, on March 6, 1983.