I love romantic operettas, probably because my voice does not lend itself for grand opera, and my personality is more in focus with a happy ending than the languishing moribund laments of a soprano dying in the end. I still cry at La Traviata. I think Verdi should have written a happy ending but since the libretto was based on Alexander Dumas's La Dame aux Camilles, he remained true to the sad finale. Anyway, we all need a good cry now and then. It cleanses the soul.

'Romance' from The Desert Song by Sigmund Romberg, is one of my favorites. The Hungarian-born musician who arrived in America in 1909, carved his career in Broadway by 1914, and wrote some of the most sensuous melodies that Warner Bros. put on screen and that Technicolor captured in some beautiful films. I wish they would remake them so that incurable romantics, such as I, can drift off into a world of fantasy, but when Broadway producers state that it costs about ten million dollars to stage one of these musicals, they take a back seat to violence and vulgarity which permeates the music industry and Hollywood currently. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had many of those movie rights and made some spectacular films with wonderful music.

I come from a musical family. My grandfather was a vaudevillian, my aunts sang opera, my mother plays the piano by ear, my cousin Tommy Zyrmont in Poland is studying music at the university in Szczecin, and is an accomplished pianist who has won many awards; and I have done my share of musical comedy shows. I even have a musical dog, Rudolph Valentino, "Rudy" for short, who likes to sing duets with me. At Christmas parties he has his own rendition of tenor arias. But when I am upstaged by a poodle, I know it is time to quit singing and concentrate on writing!

Some think of us as crazy. We are the impossible dreamers of the zodiac, the romantics who paint this world in pastel tones with our music, poetry, paintings, ballet, opera, symphonies and romantic novels, drawn from every culture and social structure. Life is a journey of discovery, and we romantics always seek each other out in a crowd because we connect on a higher spiritual plain. Let the realists rule the world; our job as artists is to clean up the mess they leave by making a louder noise in our own quiet way.

In The Hills of Cortona

The sound of the rustling of the delicate leaves of the linden trees swaying in the balmy breeze, and catching the sun's eye, was balm to me. It was as if they were dancing a fairy ballet to the music of the wind in the Cortona hills, totally oblivious to the world I knew. For a moment time stood still, and I was reminded of all the beauty on this earth; and for an eternal second nothing else existed. All hatred and wars stopped completely. I alone communed with nature, and if this was what death was like, I no longer feared its silent eternity. There, standing alone, in the hills of Cortona, listening to the singing of the birds, I wondered, why can't we all be this happy? We must make the time to search our souls and spread joy to others, through music and art; for if we don't, we revert back to a world filled with only vulgarity. We, the artists of the world, owe it to humanity to record the beauty we see, for it is all around us, and we must share it as we travel through our own artistic destiny.

Alinka Zyrmont

"The musician's art is to send light into the depths of men's hearts." Robert Schumann

"Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music." George Eliot

"Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart." Henry Ward Beecher

"It is extraordinary how music sends one back into memories of the past. George Sand

"Music is the meditation between the intellectual and sensuous life." Beethoven