“Well, I sang opera by mistake on Voyager,” Picardo told Den of Geek. “I suggested to the producers that I listened to opera, and they misunderstood me. And then it was too late. They’d already written a show where I was singing.”
Picardo’s voice really is excellent, but what seems to most interest the actor is what the Doctor’s love of music says about who he is, even hundreds of years in the future.
“I never intended to sing — the idea of an artificial intelligence, a computer program having a hobby is silly enough,” PIcardo said. “But that an emotionless, humorless program, which I was at the beginning of Voyager, would pick such an emotional form of human art! Cut to hundreds of years in the future, it’s his sustaining passion outside of medicine, and he wants to share it with students who aren’t particularly interested in it.”
But in Starfleet Academy, not only does the Doctor get the chance to teach his students about the art form he’s loved for so long, but he actually gets to take part in it. (And not on a Holodeck.) During the series’ second episode, “Beta Test,” the Doctor gets the chance to perform a gorgeous rendition of Mozart’s “Pa Pa Pa Pa” from The Magic Flute as part of the entertainment during a reception for the visiting Betazoid delegation. And he absolutely smashes it. How far we’ve come, indeed.
“To perform again, and to sing with this wonderful actress from the Canadian Opera Company, [Jamie Groote], was great fun and a challenge and scary because I want to be good enough that I sound passable. I’m singing with a professional opera singer!” PIcardo said. “One of the leading voices in opera right now, Arturo Chacón Cruz, this is a good friend of mine. I have to be decent for these people to sit and watch the show. So I worked my butt off. That’s the answer.”
