Many of the local tribes believe that the Amazon was created when Anacondas descended out of the Milky way and crawled across the land, carving the rivers.

From WQXR in the Metropolitan Opera,

this is Ariacode.

I'm Rianna Giddens.

There were hundreds and hundreds of blue morphal butterflies and then they would fly up and you'd just be covered in a cloud of gorgeous blue butterflies.

Every episode we plunge below the surface of a single aria so that we can understand its depths.

Today it's the glorious final Aria escutrame from Florencia in the Amazonas by Daniel Katae.

Even if you want to negate love, love will find you.

You can't escape it, and you don't need to fear it

because it births you and it keeps reburthing you.

It's the early 1900s and the steamship El Dorado

is making its way along the Amazon River towards Manaus, a city in the jungle heart of Brazil.

The great diva Florencea Grimaldi is on board. She has a gig at the opera house in Manaus, but that's just a cover.

She's actually going home to reunite with her long lost love, the butterfly catcher,

Cristobal. Twenty years ago she left him the butterfly catcher, Kristobal.

Twenty years ago, she left him to make her name as an opera singer, but now that she's achieved all the success and fame that she's ever dreamed about,

she realizes how much she misses the man

who helped her find her voice in the first place.

The steamship, the river, and the mystical Amazonian rainforest

are the setting of Mexican composer Daniel Catan's third opera.

Catan had two major fascinations when he set out to compose Florencea in the mid-1990s.

One, the sounds of nature and the challenge of recreating those sounds in music.

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