I find soprano singing voices to be irritating, but I also don't claim to have a refined taste. What IS refined taste anyway?
Music, to me, is like food: I stuff it in my mouth (or in my ears, respectively), and I either go "Mmhm!" or I go "Yuck!", and that determines whether or not I like it and whether or not I want more of it. It's really as simple as that for me. This is entirely independent of intellectual aspects. I know that opera music is frequently complex, I know that it requires a lot of skill on the part of the performers, and I acknowledge that it is culturally deeply embedded. But I still don't enjoy it, at least for the most part. If that makes me a musically brute, so be it. I can live with that.
When I was in elementary school, in the late 1970s, I had an extraordinary teacher. She was a tough one, and in some ways I felt, even more so in retrospect, that she was a relic that had come straight out of the Third Reich (which she had, that was when she had been a young teacher). I was frequently at odds with her (and was punished for my refusal to shut up when it would have served me well with having to sit with the Turkish kids in the back, who in turn I befriended and got to meet their families), but she did one thing no other teacher did: she often took the class to historical and cultural places, and she took us to the state opera house in Mannheim (German city).
So before I was even a teenager, I had experienced operas like The Magic Flute, Madame Butterfly, Hänsel and Gretel, and so forth. It was very impressive, different from what I had seen and known, a stark contrast to the pop music I was used to (nobody in my family listened to classical music). If not for her, I would probably still not have seen those operas. The atmosphere was tight, magical even. I liked the instrumental aspects, too, the many different instruments playing together. But the high pitched voices were painful in my ears, and I still feel that way some thirty-five years later.
It reminds me of my deaf great-grandmother who would bake fantastic stuff like only grannies do, but she had the annoying habit of putting succade into everything she made. Succade was inescapable in her household, just like that jasmine scent diffuser she had in her bathroom. It ruined everything, and I'd always pick it out of the cake and the dumplings. Soprano voices in operas are like succade in cookies for me.
