I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, Ah this indeed is music — that suits me. Walt Whitman wasn’t always an opera fan. As a budding young journalist in New York, he was known to take potshots at the etiquette and artifice of what he saw as an aristocratic pastime.

Whitman cultivated a more democratic persona and preferred popular songs, which he called “heart” — as opposed to “art” — music. But in the late 1840s, when he was nearing 30, Whitman found himself suddenly under the spell of bel canto masterpieces by Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. He grew to idolize divas and claimed to have never missed a New York appearance by the Italian contralto Marietta Alboni, who “roused whirlwinds of feeling within me,” he later recalled.