One year after Elizabeth Caballero had her first voice lesson, Luciano
Pavarotti told her that she was a diamond in the rough.  This was shortly
after she auditioned with Sandy Patti's "Love in Any Language" because she
didn't know any opera.

Fast-forward to last week, and now Caballero is singing Fiordiligi in the
San Francisco Opera Center's "Cosi fan tutte." The diamond is obvious, but
there is no roughness in her theatrically winning, vocally gutsy and smart
performance - at home in opera, comfortable with Mozart.

A blue-eyed Cubana from a Southern Baptist family in Havana, Caballero
encompasses even more significant contradictions.  She is a budding diva
without an ounce of pretension or affectation.  In a quarter century of
talking with Merola Program participants, I have not met a more relaxed,
natural, quietly self-confident young singer.  Or one who is more
comfortable around what is generally regarded as the greatest threat to
singers:  food.

Even her career plan is based on her liking for the Andalusian-Cuban
dish fricase de pollo.  The more thoroughly cooked, the longer kept,
she explains, the better it tastes.  That's how she wants to make her
debut in the great opera houses of the world - "when I am well cooked."

She may not need much more vocal baking, but there is a lot of work to
do in acquiring background in opera, diction in anything besides English
or Spanish, especially French.  With all that natural equipment and
musicality, she's still very much a newbie, and the novelty is all to
the good:  "this is fun," she says, and really means it.

Her relaxed, happy nature is all the more remarkable when considering
the dramatic events of her childhood.  Caballero was 6 when her parents
had to make a Sophie's-Choice-like decision.  Among the 1980 Cuban
boat-lift refugees, the family of six was given four seats in the boat.
The decision:  parents, Elizabeth and her younger sister, Judy, got into
the boat, her grandparents stayed behind.  (A few years later, they managed
to join the family in Miami, the grandfather to witness Caballero's first
successes before he died, the grandmother masterminding her musical
progress.)

She had her first voice lesson in the Miami-Dade Community College, at 18,
and when given Musetta's aria from "La Boheme" to study, she said "Opera?!
OK, whatever." She picked up the score and " started making fun of what
an opera singer should sound like.  I knew that opera existed, I heard it
before, but never listened to it.  Never been to an opera.  I would see it
on TV, but - coming from the Cuban background - I knew more about
zarzuelas, although I didn't care much even about those."

Just one year later, she made a decision.  "When I told my father I'll
study opera.  He asked, `Why opera?' I told him, `You know what, Dad, it's
pretty cool, and if I can sing opera, I can sing anything.  But it was also
a fun thing, it still is."

Then, singing an aria from "La Rondine" for Pavarotti, there came "one
moment, when I did the high C and right before I went to the high B flat
pianissimo, something happened - I have yet to sing a pianissimo that
perfectly as on that day - and he goes:  `Elizabeth, you are like a diamond
that needs to be polished'."

Everything went into hyper-speed after that:  getting married, receiving
a BA in music from the University of Miami, acceptance in the Florida
Grand Opera's Young Artist Program, placing as a finalist in this year's
Pavarotti International Voice Competition, being one of the final 10 in the
2001 Metropolitan National Auditions (winning a $5,000 prize and appearance
with the Met orchestra), winning the Schloss Leopoldskron Voice Competition
in Salzburg, joining Merola, next going on a two-month-long Western Opera
road trip with "Cosi."

(http://www.sfopera.com/associations/wot/2001boxoffice.htm)

Anyone with a year like that behind her may be expected to take herself
seriously or worse.  Not Caballero.  She is just enjoying her "good luck,"
has no agent, her only coach is piano salesman Manuel Perez ("an angel")
who has never charged her a fee, she has no worries about her future - the
fricase is still "maturing." Happily.

Janos Gereben/SF
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