Shirley Love Shirley Love Shirley Love (born January 6, 1940) is an American operatic mezzo-soprano. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she studied singing in her home city with Avery Crew before pursuing further voice training with Marinka Gurevich and Margaret Harshaw in New York City. She made her professional opera début at the Metropolitan Opera on November 30, 1963 as the Second Lady in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "The Magic Flute" with Anna Moffo as Pamina, Nicolai Gedda as Tamino, Gianna D'Angelo as The Queen of the Night, Cesare Siepi as Sarastro, Theodor Uppman as Papageno, and Silvio Varviso conducting. Love remained at the
Agrippina (opera) hypocritical; Claudius is pompous, complacent, and something of a buffoon, while Poppaea, the first of Handel's sex kittens, is also a liar and a flirt. The freedmen Pallas and Narcissus are self-serving and salacious. All, however, have some redeeming features, and all have arias that express genuine emotion. The situations in which they find themselves are sometimes comic, but never farcical—like Mozart in the Da Ponte operas, Handel avoids laughing at his characters. In "Agrippina" the "da capo" aria is the musical form used to illustrate character in the context of the opera. The first four arias of the work