A few weeks ago, Angelina Jolie was spotted at the Met, attending a performance of Puccini’s Tosca with Pablo Larrain. It came during one of several trips she’s made to New York in recent months, almost all of which have been to promote Larrain’s Maria, where Jolie plays Maria Callas. What we didn’t know last month was that a New York Times reporter was along for the ride at the opera, and that it was all for a rather lovely piece about Jolie and about opera. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Jolie identified with Callas’s isolation. “Loneliness is not a bad thing. We’re both seen as strong, but actually we’re very vulnerable and human. I don’t think either one of us is necessarily comfortable being public.”

Jolie was worried about her singing voice: For years, she had carried the trauma of a boyfriend telling her she had a bad voice and that she should be grateful she had other talents. “It was nasty, and it was more than once. Then I stopped singing.” She told Larraín that she had “a lot of emotion and pain that I did not feel like letting go.” She was not very familiar with classical music; she had grown up listening to punk bands like the Clash. And she wasn’t sure she had the technique to sing — until that point, she had avoided even “Happy Birthday.”

She sang “Piangete voi?” at La Scala: The aria was one of the most challenging on the list, but it was also Jolie’s favorite. Dressed in a costume that matched Callas’s, with a white headpiece and navy dress, she sang before a crowd of about 500 people. “It’s like jumping off a cliff. There was just nothing I could do but try to give everything I had.”

Her mother’s death: Her mother’s death from cancer in 2007, at 56, made Jolie feel she no longer had the luxury of time. “I don’t want to be comfortable or too relaxed,” she said. “I want to live fully.”

She’s concerned about revealing too many truths. “When you are stripped of so many things that make you feel safe and whole, you really sit with what matters to you and what you want to give every breath in your body for. In the end, I found a lot of softness.” She said she hoped that despite all that, Callas was able to “feel safe to be soft and hopefully eventually rediscover a level of joy.”

Has Jolie found joy again? “I don’t know about that. But I hope for it. I hope to find a lightness that I may have lost along the way.”

[From The NY Times]

There’s a lot in the Times piece about how Jolie has a rare, genuine elusiveness and not even Pablo Larrain really knows her and they worked together for months. When Jolie walked into the Met, apparently people gasped and began murmuring and trying to take her photo too. The Met let Jolie linger after Tosca – she and Pablo met several people working on the opera, and they let Jolie go on stage and examine the set. It’s actually a really lovely portrait, and Jolie’s unwillingness to talk about her personal life just made it even more interesting. I mean, she’s been doing this for a while, she knows how to talk around her eight-year-plus divorce. “When you are stripped of so many things that make you feel safe and whole” – f–k Brad Pitt. She’s spent eight years just trying to feel safe and whole again.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.