Opera lovers cry because they dimly sense that singing is an attempt to escape from words. Language is like a prison house, he thinks, and the singing voice is like a dove trapped inside: the voice wants to float free, without having to mean anything. In every great aria, there is a moment when the voice—especially a woman's voice, especially a soprano—begins to do amazing things, warbling and trilling, flying up to impossibly high pitches, falling through cascades of arpeggios and grace notes. The words that are sung are under incredible tension: a single syllable can be pulled and stretched so that it seems to go on forever. At some point the listener will lose track of the words altogether, and it is then—especially when a single note is held for an impossibly long time, until finally there is a break just before the end, when the singer gasps silently for breath—that people start to cry. Listeners sense that the singer's voice had almost broken free of language, and at the same time they know that the voice can never break out of language. After the soprano catches her breath and sings the tonic note, the opera goes on in ordinary human language. Poizat thinks only angels can sing and still not make sense; if human singers could actually move outside of language the result would be a wild screaming, something dangerously close to insanity. According to Poizat, all true opera lovers feel this, even if it's unconscious, and all true opera lovers cry. Ordinary pole-faced opera fans do not understand that when the coloratura sings, it's not a human voice they are hearing but "the angel's cry."
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