What is the meaning of the word opera

Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a «work» (the literal translation of the Italian word «opera») is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist^[1] and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another.^[2]

Opera is a key part of the Western classical music tradition.^[3] Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as Singspiel and Opéra comique. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of singing: recitative, a speech-inflected style,^[4] and self-contained arias. The 19th century saw the rise of the continuous music drama.

Opera originated in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri’s mostly lost Dafne, produced in Florence in 1598) especially from works by Claudio Monteverdi, notably L’Orfeo, and soon spread through the rest of Europe: Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England all helped to establish their national traditions in the 17th century. In the 18th century, Italian opera continued to dominate most of Europe (except France), attracting foreign composers such as George Frideric Handel. Opera seria was the most prestigious form of Italian opera, until Christoph Willibald Gluck reacted against its artificiality with his «reform» operas in the 1760s. The most renowned figure of late 18th-century opera is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who began with opera seria but is most famous for his Italian comic operas, especially The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, as well as Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), and The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), landmarks in the German tradition.

The first third of the 19th century saw the high point of the bel canto style, with Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini all creating signature works of that style. It also saw the advent of grand opera typified by the works of Daniel Auber and Giacomo Meyerbeer as well as Carl Maria von Weber’s introduction of German Romantische Oper (German Romantic Opera). The mid-to-late 19th century was a golden age of opera, led and dominated by Giuseppe Verdi in Italy and Richard Wagner in Germany. The popularity of opera continued through the verismo era in Italy and contemporary French opera through to Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss in the early 20th century. During the 19th century, parallel operatic traditions emerged in central and eastern Europe, particularly in Russia and Bohemia. The 20th century saw many experiments with modern styles, such as atonality and serialism (Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg), neoclassicism (Igor Stravinsky), and minimalism (Philip Glass and John Adams). With the rise of recording technology, singers such as Enrico Caruso and Maria Callas became known to much wider audiences that went beyond the circle of opera fans. Since the invention of radio and television, operas were also performed on (and written for) these media. Beginning in 2006, a number of major opera houses began to present live high-definition video transmissions of their performances in cinemas all over the world. Since 2009, complete performances can be downloaded and are live streamed.

Operatic terminology[edit]

The words of an opera are known as the libretto (meaning «small book»). Some composers, notably Wagner, have written their own libretti; others have worked in close collaboration with their librettists, e.g. Mozart with Lorenzo Da Ponte. Traditional opera, often referred to as «number opera», consists of two modes of singing: recitative, the plot-driving passages sung in a style designed to imitate and emphasize the inflections of speech,^[4] and aria (an «air» or formal song) in which the characters express their emotions in a more structured melodic style. Vocal duets, trios and other ensembles often occur, and choruses are used to comment on the action. In some forms of opera, such as singspiel, opéra comique, operetta, and semi-opera, the recitative is mostly replaced by spoken dialogue. Melodic or semi-melodic passages occurring in the midst of, or instead of, recitative, are also referred to as arioso. The terminology of the various kinds of operatic voices is described in detail below.^[5] During both the Baroque and Classical periods, recitative could appear in two basic forms, each of which was accompanied by a different instrumental ensemble: secco (dry) recitative, sung with a free rhythm dictated by the accent of the words, accompanied only by basso continuo, which was usually a harpsichord and a cello; or accompagnato (also known as strumentato) in which the orchestra provided accompaniment. Over the 18th century, arias were increasingly accompanied by the orchestra. By the 19th century, accompagnato had gained the upper hand, the orchestra played a much bigger role, and Wagner revolutionized opera by abolishing almost all distinction between aria and recitative in his quest for what Wagner termed «endless melody». Subsequent composers have tended to follow Wagner’s example, though some, such as Stravinsky in his The Rake’s Progress have bucked the trend. The changing role of the orchestra in opera is described in more detail below.

History[edit]

Origins[edit]

The Italian word opera means «work», both in the sense of the labour done and the result produced. The Italian word derives from the Latin word opera, a singular noun meaning «work» and also the plural of the noun opus. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Italian word was first used in the sense «composition in which poetry, dance, and music are combined» in 1639; the first recorded English usage in this sense dates to 1648.^[6]

Dafne by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today. It was written around 1597, largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the «Camerata de’ Bardi». Significantly, Dafne was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. The members of the Camerata considered that the «chorus» parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of «restoring» this situation. Dafne, however, is lost. A later work by Peri, Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived until the present day. However, the honour of being the first opera still to be regularly performed goes to Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, composed for the court of Mantua in 1607.^[7] The Mantua court of the Gonzagas, employers of Monteverdi, played a significant role in the origin of opera employing not only court singers of the concerto delle donne (till 1598), but also one of the first actual «opera singers», Madama Europa.^[8]

Italian opera[edit]

Baroque era[edit]

Opera did not remain confined to court audiences for long. In 1637, the idea of a «season» (often during the carnival) of publicly attended operas supported by ticket sales emerged in Venice. Monteverdi had moved to the city from Mantua and composed his last operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea, for the Venetian theatre in the 1640s. His most important follower Francesco Cavalli helped spread opera throughout Italy. In these early Baroque operas, broad comedy was blended with tragic elements in a mix that jarred some educated sensibilities, sparking the first of opera’s many reform movements, sponsored by the Arcadian Academy, which came to be associated with the poet Metastasio, whose libretti helped crystallize the genre of opera seria, which became the leading form of Italian opera until the end of the 18th century. Once the Metastasian ideal had been firmly established, comedy in Baroque-era opera was reserved for what came to be called opera buffa. Before such elements were forced out of opera seria, many libretti had featured a separately unfolding comic plot as sort of an «opera-within-an-opera». One reason for this was an attempt to attract members of the growing merchant class, newly wealthy, but still not as cultured as the nobility, to the public opera houses. These separate plots were almost immediately resurrected in a separately developing tradition that partly derived from the commedia dell’arte, a long-flourishing improvisatory stage tradition of Italy. Just as intermedi had once been performed in between the acts of stage plays, operas in the new comic genre of intermezzi, which developed largely in Naples in the 1710s and 1720s, were initially staged during the intermissions of opera seria. They became so popular, however, that they were soon being offered as separate productions.

Opera seria was elevated in tone and highly stylised in form, usually consisting of secco recitative interspersed with long da capo arias. These afforded great opportunity for virtuosic singing and during the golden age of opera seria the singer really became the star. The role of the hero was usually written for the high-pitched male castrato voice, which was produced by castration of the singer before puberty, which prevented a boy’s larynx from being transformed at puberty. Castrati such as Farinelli and Senesino, as well as female sopranos such as Faustina Bordoni, became in great demand throughout Europe as opera seria ruled the stage in every country except France. Farinelli was one of the most famous singers of the 18th century. Italian opera set the Baroque standard. Italian libretti were the norm, even when a German composer like Handel found himself composing the likes of Rinaldo and Giulio Cesare for London audiences. Italian libretti remained dominant in the classical period as well, for example in the operas of Mozart, who wrote in Vienna near the century’s close. Leading Italian-born composers of opera seria include Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi and Nicola Porpora.^[9]

Gluck’s reforms and Mozart[edit]

Opera seria had its weaknesses and critics. The taste for embellishment on behalf of the superbly trained singers, and the use of spectacle as a replacement for dramatic purity and unity drew attacks. Francesco Algarotti’s Essay on the Opera (1755) proved to be an inspiration for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s reforms. He advocated that opera seria had to return to basics and that all the various elements—music (both instrumental and vocal), ballet, and staging—must be subservient to the overriding drama. In 1765 Melchior Grimm published «Poème lyrique«, an influential article for the Encyclopédie on lyric and opera librettos.^{[10][11][12][13][14]} Several composers of the period, including Niccolò Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta, attempted to put these ideals into practice. The first to succeed however, was Gluck. Gluck strove to achieve a «beautiful simplicity». This is evident in his first reform opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, where his non-virtuosic vocal melodies are supported by simple harmonies and a richer orchestra presence throughout.

Gluck’s reforms have had resonance throughout operatic history. Weber, Mozart, and Wagner, in particular, were influenced by his ideals. Mozart, in many ways Gluck’s successor, combined a superb sense of drama, harmony, melody, and counterpoint to write a series of comic operas with libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte, notably Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, which remain among the most-loved, popular and well-known operas. But Mozart’s contribution to opera seria was more mixed; by his time it was dying away, and in spite of such fine works as Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito, he would not succeed in bringing the art form back to life again.^[15]

Bel canto, Verdi and verismo[edit]

The bel canto opera movement flourished in the early 19th century and is exemplified by the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Pacini, Mercadante and many others. Literally «beautiful singing», bel canto opera derives from the Italian stylistic singing school of the same name. Bel canto lines are typically florid and intricate, requiring supreme agility and pitch control. Examples of famous operas in the bel canto style include Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola, as well as Bellini’s Norma, La sonnambula and I puritani and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, L’elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale.

Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly popularized by Giuseppe Verdi, beginning with his biblical opera Nabucco. This opera, and the ones that would follow in Verdi’s career, revolutionized Italian opera, changing it from merely a display of vocal fireworks, with Rossini’s and Donizetti’s works, to dramatic story-telling. Verdi’s operas resonated with the growing spirit of Italian nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era, and he quickly became an icon of the patriotic movement for a unified Italy. In the early 1850s, Verdi produced his three most popular operas: Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. The first of these, Rigoletto, proved the most daring and revolutionary. In it, Verdi blurs the distinction between the aria and recitative as it never before was, leading the opera to be «an unending string of duets». La traviata was also novel. It tells the story of courtesan, and is often cited as one of the first «realistic» operas,^{[citation needed]} because rather than featuring great kings and figures from literature, it focuses on the tragedies of ordinary life and society. After these, he continued to develop his style, composing perhaps the greatest French grand opera, Don Carlos, and ending his career with two Shakespeare-inspired works, Otello and Falstaff, which reveal how far Italian opera had grown in sophistication since the early 19th century. These final two works showed Verdi at his most masterfully orchestrated, and are both incredibly influential, and modern. In Falstaff, Verdi sets the preeminent standard for the form and style that would dominate opera throughout the twentieth century. Rather than long, suspended melodies, Falstaff contains many little motifs and mottos, that, rather than being expanded upon, are introduced and subsequently dropped, only to be brought up again later. These motifs never are expanded upon, and just as the audience expects a character to launch into a long melody, a new character speaks, introducing a new phrase. This fashion of opera directed opera from Verdi, onward, exercising tremendous influence on his successors Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten.^[16]

After Verdi, the sentimental «realistic» melodrama of verismo appeared in Italy. This was a style introduced by Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci that came to dominate the world’s opera stages with such popular works as Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly. Later Italian composers, such as Berio and Nono, have experimented with modernism.^[17]

German-language opera[edit]

The first German opera was Dafne, composed by Heinrich Schütz in 1627, but the music score has not survived. Italian opera held a great sway over German-speaking countries until the late 18th century. Nevertheless, native forms would develop in spite of this influence. In 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the first Singspiel, Seelewig, a popular form of German-language opera in which singing alternates with spoken dialogue. In the late 17th century and early 18th century, the Theater am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg presented German operas by Keiser, Telemann and Handel. Yet most of the major German composers of the time, including Handel himself, as well as Graun, Hasse and later Gluck, chose to write most of their operas in foreign languages, especially Italian. In contrast to Italian opera, which was generally composed for the aristocratic class, German opera was generally composed for the masses and tended to feature simple folk-like melodies, and it was not until the arrival of Mozart that German opera was able to match its Italian counterpart in musical sophistication.^[18] The theatre company of Abel Seyler pioneered serious German-language opera in the 1770s, marking a break with the previous simpler musical entertainment.^[19][20]

Mozart’s Singspiele, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) and Die Zauberflöte (1791) were an important breakthrough in achieving international recognition for German opera. The tradition was developed in the 19th century by Beethoven with his Fidelio (1805), inspired by the climate of the French Revolution. Carl Maria von Weber established German Romantic opera in opposition to the dominance of Italian bel canto. His Der Freischütz (1821) shows his genius for creating a supernatural atmosphere. Other opera composers of the time include Marschner, Schubert and Lortzing, but the most significant figure was undoubtedly Wagner.

Wagner was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history. Starting under the influence of Weber and Meyerbeer, he gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a «complete work of art»), a fusion of music, poetry and painting. He greatly increased the role and power of the orchestra, creating scores with a complex web of leitmotifs, recurring themes often associated with the characters and concepts of the drama, of which prototypes can be heard in his earlier operas such as Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin; and he was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such as tonality, in his quest for greater expressivity. In his mature music dramas, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, he abolished the distinction between aria and recitative in favour of a seamless flow of «endless melody». Wagner also brought a new philosophical dimension to opera in his works, which were usually based on stories from Germanic or Arthurian legend. Finally, Wagner built his own opera house at Bayreuth with part of the patronage from Ludwig II of Bavaria, exclusively dedicated to performing his own works in the style he wanted.

Opera would never be the same after Wagner and for many composers his legacy proved a heavy burden. On the other hand, Richard Strauss accepted Wagnerian ideas but took them in wholly new directions, along with incorporating the new form introduced by Verdi. He first won fame with the scandalous Salome and the dark tragedy Elektra, in which tonality was pushed to the limits. Then Strauss changed tack in his greatest success, Der Rosenkavalier, where Mozart and Viennese waltzes became as important an influence as Wagner. Strauss continued to produce a highly varied body of operatic works, often with libretti by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Other composers who made individual contributions to German opera in the early 20th century include Alexander von Zemlinsky, Erich Korngold, Franz Schreker, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill and the Italian-born Ferruccio Busoni. The operatic innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and his successors are discussed in the section on modernism.^[21]

During the late 19th century, the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II, an admirer of the French-language operettas composed by Jacques Offenbach, composed several German-language operettas, the most famous of which was Die Fledermaus.^[22] Nevertheless, rather than copying the style of Offenbach, the operettas of Strauss II had distinctly Viennese flavor to them.

French opera[edit]

In rivalry with imported Italian opera productions, a separate French tradition was founded by the Italian-born French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of King Louis XIV. Despite his foreign birthplace, Lully established an Academy of Music and monopolised French opera from 1672. Starting with Cadmus et Hermione, Lully and his librettist Quinault created tragédie en musique, a form in which dance music and choral writing were particularly prominent. Lully’s operas also show a concern for expressive recitative which matched the contours of the French language. In the 18th century, Lully’s most important successor was Jean-Philippe Rameau, who composed five tragédies en musique as well as numerous works in other genres such as opéra-ballet, all notable for their rich orchestration and harmonic daring. Despite the popularity of Italian opera seria throughout much of Europe during the Baroque period, Italian opera never gained much of a foothold in France, where its own national operatic tradition was more popular instead.^[23] After Rameau’s death, the German Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for the Parisian stage in the 1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with greater focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the 18th century another genre was gaining popularity in France: opéra comique. This was the equivalent of the German singspiel, where arias alternated with spoken dialogue. Notable examples in this style were produced by Monsigny, Philidor and, above all, Grétry. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, composers such as Étienne Méhul, Luigi Cherubini and Gaspare Spontini, who were followers of Gluck, brought a new seriousness to the genre, which had never been wholly «comic» in any case. Another phenomenon of this period was the ‘propaganda opera’ celebrating revolutionary successes, e.g. Gossec’s Le triomphe de la République (1793).

By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for Italian bel canto, especially after the arrival of Rossini in Paris. Rossini’s Guillaume Tell helped found the new genre of grand opera, a form whose most famous exponent was another foreigner, Giacomo Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer’s works, such as Les Huguenots, emphasised virtuoso singing and extraordinary stage effects. Lighter opéra comique also enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boïeldieu, Auber, Hérold and Adam. In this climate, the operas of the French-born composer Hector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing. Berlioz’s epic masterpiece Les Troyens, the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a full performance for almost a hundred years.

In the second half of the 19th century, Jacques Offenbach created operetta with witty and cynical works such as Orphée aux enfers, as well as the opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann; Charles Gounod scored a massive success with Faust; and Georges Bizet composed Carmen, which, once audiences learned to accept its blend of Romanticism and realism, became the most popular of all opéra comiques. Jules Massenet, Camille Saint-Saëns and Léo Delibes all composed works which are still part of the standard repertory, examples being Massenet’s Manon, Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila and Delibes’ Lakmé. Their operas formed another genre, the Opera Lyrique, combined opera comique and grand opera. It is less grandiose than grand opera, but without the spoken dialogue of opera comique. At the same time, the influence of Richard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition. Many French critics angrily rejected Wagner’s music dramas while many French composers closely imitated them with variable success. Perhaps the most interesting response came from Claude Debussy. As in Wagner’s works, the orchestra plays a leading role in Debussy’s unique opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and there are no real arias, only recitative. But the drama is understated, enigmatic and completely un-Wagnerian.

Other notable 20th-century names include Ravel, Dukas, Roussel, Honegger and Milhaud. Francis Poulenc is one of the very few post-war composers of any nationality whose operas (which include Dialogues des Carmélites) have gained a foothold in the international repertory. Olivier Messiaen’s lengthy sacred drama Saint François d’Assise (1983) has also attracted widespread attention.^[24]

English-language opera[edit]

In England, opera’s antecedent was the 17th-century jig. This was an afterpiece that came at the end of a play. It was frequently libellous and scandalous and consisted in the main of dialogue set to music arranged from popular tunes. In this respect, jigs anticipate the ballad operas of the 18th century. At the same time, the French masque was gaining a firm hold at the English Court, with even more lavish splendour and highly realistic scenery than had been seen before. Inigo Jones became the quintessential designer of these productions, and this style was to dominate the English stage for three centuries. These masques contained songs and dances. In Ben Jonson’s Lovers Made Men (1617), «the whole masque was sung after the Italian manner, stilo recitativo».^[25] The approach of the English Commonwealth closed theatres and halted any developments that may have led to the establishment of English opera. However, in 1656, the dramatist Sir William Davenant produced The Siege of Rhodes. Since his theatre was not licensed to produce drama, he asked several of the leading composers (Lawes, Cooke, Locke, Coleman and Hudson) to set sections of it to music. This success was followed by The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659). These pieces were encouraged by Oliver Cromwell because they were critical of Spain. With the English Restoration, foreign (especially French) musicians were welcomed back. In 1673, Thomas Shadwell’s Psyche, patterned on the 1671 ‘comédie-ballet’ of the same name produced by Molière and Jean-Baptiste Lully. William Davenant produced The Tempest in the same year, which was the first musical adaption of a Shakespeare play (composed by Locke and Johnson).^[25] About 1683, John Blow composed Venus and Adonis, often thought of as the first true English-language opera.

Blow’s immediate successor was the better known Henry Purcell. Despite the success of his masterwork Dido and Aeneas (1689), in which the action is furthered by the use of Italian-style recitative, much of Purcell’s best work was not involved in the composing of typical opera, but instead, he usually worked within the constraints of the semi-opera format, where isolated scenes and masques are contained within the structure of a spoken play, such as Shakespeare in Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen (1692) and Beaumont and Fletcher in The Prophetess (1690) and Bonduca (1696). The main characters of the play tend not to be involved in the musical scenes, which means that Purcell was rarely able to develop his characters through song. Despite these hindrances, his aim (and that of his collaborator John Dryden) was to establish serious opera in England, but these hopes ended with Purcell’s early death at the age of 36.

Following Purcell, the popularity of opera in England dwindled for several decades. A revived interest in opera occurred in the 1730s which is largely attributed to Thomas Arne, both for his own compositions and for alerting Handel to the commercial possibilities of large-scale works in English. Arne was the first English composer to experiment with Italian-style all-sung comic opera, with his greatest success being Thomas and Sally in 1760. His opera Artaxerxes (1762) was the first attempt to set a full-blown opera seria in English and was a huge success, holding the stage until the 1830s. Although Arne imitated many elements of Italian opera, he was perhaps the only English composer at that time who was able to move beyond the Italian influences and create his own unique and distinctly English voice. His modernized ballad opera, Love in a Village (1762), began a vogue for pastiche opera that lasted well into the 19th century. Charles Burney wrote that Arne introduced «a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English composers had either pillaged or imitated».

Besides Arne, the other dominating force in English opera at this time was George Frideric Handel, whose opera serias filled the London operatic stages for decades and influenced most home-grown composers, like John Frederick Lampe, who wrote using Italian models. This situation continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including in the work of Michael William Balfe, and the operas of the great Italian composers, as well as those of Mozart, Beethoven, and Meyerbeer, continued to dominate the musical stage in England.

The only exceptions were ballad operas, such as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), musical burlesques, European operettas, and late Victorian era light operas, notably the Savoy Operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, all of which types of musical entertainments frequently spoofed operatic conventions. Sullivan wrote only one grand opera, Ivanhoe (following the efforts of a number of young English composers beginning about 1876),^[25] but he claimed that even his light operas constituted part of a school of «English» opera, intended to supplant the French operettas (usually performed in bad translations) that had dominated the London stage from the mid-19th century into the 1870s. London’s Daily Telegraph agreed, describing The Yeomen of the Guard as «a genuine English opera, forerunner of many others, let us hope, and possibly significant of an advance towards a national lyric stage».^[26] Sullivan produced a few light operas in the 1890s that were of a more serious nature than those in the G&S series, including Haddon Hall and The Beauty Stone, but Ivanhoe (which ran for 155 consecutive performances, using alternating casts—a record until Broadway’s La bohème) survives as his only grand opera.

In the 20th century, English opera began to assert more independence, with works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and in particular Benjamin Britten, who in a series of works that remain in standard repertory today, revealed an excellent flair for the dramatic and superb musicality. More recently Sir Harrison Birtwistle has emerged as one of Britain’s most significant contemporary composers from his first opera Punch and Judy to his most recent critical success in The Minotaur. In the first decade of the 21st century, the librettist of an early Birtwistle opera, Michael Nyman, has been focusing on composing operas, including Facing Goya, Man and Boy: Dada, and Love Counts. Today composers such as Thomas Adès continue to export English opera abroad.^[27]

Also in the 20th century, American composers like George Gershwin (Porgy and Bess), Scott Joplin (Treemonisha), Leonard Bernstein (Candide), Gian Carlo Menotti, Douglas Moore, and Carlisle Floyd began to contribute English-language operas infused with touches of popular musical styles. They were followed by composers such as Philip Glass (Einstein on the Beach), Mark Adamo, John Corigliano (The Ghosts of Versailles), Robert Moran, John Adams (Nixon in China), André Previn and Jake Heggie. Many contemporary 21st century opera composers have emerged such as Missy Mazzoli, Kevin Puts, Tom Cipullo, Huang Ruo, David T. Little, Terence Blanchard, Jennifer Higdon, Tobias Picker, Michael Ching, Anthony Davis, and Ricky Ian Gordon.

Russian opera[edit]

Opera was brought to Russia in the 1730s by the Italian operatic troupes and soon it became an important part of entertainment for the Russian Imperial Court and aristocracy. Many foreign composers such as Baldassare Galuppi, Giovanni Paisiello, Giuseppe Sarti, and Domenico Cimarosa (as well as various others) were invited to Russia to compose new operas, mostly in the Italian language. Simultaneously some domestic musicians like Maksym Berezovsky and Dmitry Bortniansky were sent abroad to learn to write operas. The first opera written in Russian was Tsefal i Prokris by the Italian composer Francesco Araja (1755). The development of Russian-language opera was supported by the Russian composers Vasily Pashkevich, Yevstigney Fomin and Alexey Verstovsky.

However, the real birth of Russian opera came with Mikhail Glinka and his two great operas A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842). After him, during the 19th century in Russia, there were written such operatic masterpieces as Rusalka and The Stone Guest by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky, Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and The Snow Maiden and Sadko by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. These developments mirrored the growth of Russian nationalism across the artistic spectrum, as part of the more general Slavophilism movement.

In the 20th century, the traditions of Russian opera were developed by many composers including Sergei Rachmaninoff in his works The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini, Igor Stravinsky in Le Rossignol, Mavra, Oedipus rex, and The Rake’s Progress, Sergei Prokofiev in The Gambler, The Love for Three Oranges, The Fiery Angel, Betrothal in a Monastery, and War and Peace; as well as Dmitri Shostakovich in The Nose and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Edison Denisov in L’écume des jours, and Alfred Schnittke in Life with an Idiot and Historia von D. Johann Fausten.^[28]

Czech opera[edit]

Czech composers also developed a thriving national opera movement of their own in the 19th century, starting with Bedřich Smetana, who wrote eight operas including the internationally popular The Bartered Bride. Smetana’s eight operas created the bedrock of the Czech opera repertory, but of these only The Bartered Bride is performed regularly outside the composer’s homeland. After reaching Vienna in 1892 and London in 1895 it rapidly became part of the repertory of every major opera company worldwide.

Antonín Dvořák’s nine operas, except his first, have librettos in Czech and were intended to convey the Czech national spirit, as were some of his choral works. By far the most successful of the operas is Rusalka which contains the well-known aria «Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém» («Song to the Moon»); it is played on contemporary opera stages frequently outside the Czech Republic. This is attributable to their uneven invention and libretti, and perhaps also their staging requirements – The Jacobin, Armida, Vanda and Dimitrij need stages large enough to portray invading armies.

Leoš Janáček gained international recognition in the 20th century for his innovative works. His later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera Jenůfa, which was premiered in 1904 in Brno. The success of Jenůfa (often called the «Moravian national opera») at Prague in 1916 gave Janáček access to the world’s great opera stages. Janáček’s later works are his most celebrated. They include operas such as Káťa Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen, the Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass.

Other national operas[edit]

Spain also produced its own distinctive form of opera, known as zarzuela, which had two separate flowerings: one from the mid-17th century through the mid-18th century, and another beginning around 1850. During the late 18th century up until the mid-19th century, Italian opera was immensely popular in Spain, supplanting the native form.

In Russian Eastern Europe, several national operas began to emerge. Ukrainian opera was developed by Semen Hulak-Artemovsky (1813–1873) whose most famous work Zaporozhets za Dunayem (A Cossack Beyond the Danube) is regularly performed around the world. Other Ukrainian opera composers include Mykola Lysenko (Taras Bulba and Natalka Poltavka), Heorhiy Maiboroda, and Yuliy Meitus. At the turn of the century, a distinct national opera movement also began to emerge in Georgia under the leadership Zacharia Paliashvili, who fused local folk songs and stories with 19th-century Romantic classical themes.

The key figure of Hungarian national opera in the 19th century was Ferenc Erkel, whose works mostly dealt with historical themes. Among his most often performed operas are Hunyadi László and Bánk bán. The most famous modern Hungarian opera is Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Straszny Dwór (in English The Haunted Manor) (1861–64) represents a nineteenth-century peak of Polish national opera.^[29] In the 20th century, other operas created by Polish composers included King Roger by Karol Szymanowski and Ubu Rex by Krzysztof Penderecki.

The first known opera from Turkey (the Ottoman Empire) was Arshak II, which was an Armenian opera composed by an ethnic Armenian composer Tigran Chukhajian in 1868 and partially performed in 1873. It was fully staged in 1945 in Armenia.

The first years of the Soviet Union saw the emergence of new national operas, such as the Koroğlu (1937) by the Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov. The first Kyrgyz opera, Ai-Churek, premiered in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre on 26 May 1939, during Kyrgyz Art Decade. It was composed by Vladimir Vlasov, Abdylas Maldybaev and Vladimir Fere. The libretto was written by Joomart Bokonbaev, Jusup Turusbekov, and Kybanychbek Malikov. The opera is based on the Kyrgyz heroic epic Manas.^[30][31]

In Iran, opera gained more attention after the introduction of Western classical music in the late 19th century. However, it took until mid 20th century for Iranian composers to start experiencing with the field, especially as the construction of the Roudaki Hall in 1967, made possible staging of a large variety of works for stage. Perhaps, the most famous Iranian opera is Rostam and Sohrab by Loris Tjeknavorian premiered not until the early 2000s.

Chinese contemporary classical opera, a Chinese language form of Western style opera that is distinct from traditional Chinese opera, has had operas dating back to The White Haired Girl in 1945.^[32][33][34]

In Latin America, opera started as a result of European colonisation. The first opera ever written in the Americas was La púrpura de la rosa, by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, although Partenope, by the Mexican Manuel de Zumaya, was the first opera written from a composer born in Latin America (music now lost). The first Brazilian opera for a libretto in Portuguese was A Noite de São João, by Elias Álvares Lobo. However, Antônio Carlos Gomes is generally regarded as the most outstanding Brazilian composer, having a relative success in Italy with its Brazilian-themed operas with Italian librettos, such as Il Guarany. Opera in Argentina developed in the 20th century after the inauguration of Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires—with the opera Aurora, by Ettore Panizza, being heavily influenced by the Italian tradition, due to immigration. Other important composers from Argentina include Felipe Boero and Alberto Ginastera.

Contemporary, recent, and modernist trends[edit]

Modernism[edit]

Perhaps the most obvious stylistic manifestation of modernism in opera is the development of atonality. The move away from traditional tonality in opera had begun with Richard Wagner, and in particular the Tristan chord. Composers such as Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Giacomo Puccini,^[35] Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten and Hans Pfitzner pushed Wagnerian harmony further with a more extreme use of chromaticism and greater use of dissonance. Another aspect of modernist opera is the shift away from long, suspended melodies, to short quick mottos, as first illustrated by Giuseppe Verdi in his Falstaff. Composers such as Strauss, Britten, Shostakovich and Stravinsky adopted and expanded upon this style.

Operatic modernism truly began in the operas of two Viennese composers, Arnold Schoenberg and his student Alban Berg, both composers and advocates of atonality and its later development (as worked out by Schoenberg), dodecaphony. Schoenberg’s early musico-dramatic works, Erwartung (1909, premiered in 1924) and Die glückliche Hand display heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance in general. Schoenberg also occasionally used Sprechstimme.

The two operas of Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg, Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (incomplete at his death in 1935) share many of the same characteristics as described above, though Berg combined his highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique with melodic passages of a more traditionally tonal nature (quite Mahlerian in character) which perhaps partially explains why his operas have remained in standard repertory, despite their controversial music and plots. Schoenberg’s theories have influenced (either directly or indirectly) significant numbers of opera composers ever since, even if they themselves did not compose using his techniques.

Composers thus influenced include the Englishman Benjamin Britten, the German Hans Werner Henze, and the Russian Dmitri Shostakovich. (Philip Glass also makes use of atonality, though his style is generally described as minimalist, usually thought of as another 20th-century development.)^[36]

However, operatic modernism’s use of atonality also sparked a backlash in the form of neoclassicism. An early leader of this movement was Ferruccio Busoni, who in 1913 wrote the libretto for his neoclassical number opera Arlecchino (first performed in 1917).^[37] Also among the vanguard was the Russian Igor Stravinsky. After composing music for the Diaghilev-produced ballets Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913), Stravinsky turned to neoclassicism, a development culminating in his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927). Stravinsky had already turned away from the modernist trends of his early ballets to produce small-scale works that do not fully qualify as opera, yet certainly contain many operatic elements, including Renard (1916: «a burlesque in song and dance») and The Soldier’s Tale (1918: «to be read, played, and danced»; in both cases the descriptions and instructions are those of the composer). In the latter, the actors declaim portions of speech to a specified rhythm over instrumental accompaniment, peculiarly similar to the older German genre of Melodrama. Well after his Rimsky-Korsakov-inspired works The Nightingale (1914), and Mavra (1922), Stravinsky continued to ignore serialist technique and eventually wrote a full-fledged 18th-century-style diatonic number opera The Rake’s Progress (1951). His resistance to serialism (an attitude he reversed following Schoenberg’s death) proved to be an inspiration for many^[who?] other composers.^[38]

Other trends[edit]

A common trend throughout the 20th century, in both opera and general orchestral repertoire, is the use of smaller orchestras as a cost-cutting measure; the grand Romantic-era orchestras with huge string sections, multiple harps, extra horns, and exotic percussion instruments were no longer feasible. As government and private patronage of the arts decreased throughout the 20th century, new works were often commissioned and performed with smaller budgets, very often resulting in chamber-sized works, and short, one-act operas. Many of Benjamin Britten’s operas are scored for as few as 13 instrumentalists; Mark Adamo’s two-act realization of Little Women is scored for 18 instrumentalists.

Another feature of late 20th-century opera is the emergence of contemporary historical operas, in contrast to the tradition of basing operas on more distant history, the re-telling of contemporary fictional stories or plays, or on myth or legend. The Death of Klinghoffer, Nixon in China, and Doctor Atomic by John Adams, Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie, and Anna Nicole by Mark-Anthony Turnage exemplify the dramatisation onstage of events in recent living memory, where characters portrayed in the opera were alive at the time of the premiere performance.

The Metropolitan Opera in the US (often known as the Met) reported in 2011 that the average age of its audience was 60.^[39] Many opera companies attempted to attract a younger audience to halt the larger trend of greying audiences for classical music since the last decades of the 20th century.^[40] Efforts resulted in lowering the average age of the Met’s audience to 58 in 2018, the average age at Berlin State Opera was reported as 54, and Paris Opera reported an average age of 48.^[41] New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini has suggested that «companies inordinately beholden to standard repertory» are not reaching younger, more curious audiences.^[42]

Smaller companies in the US have a more fragile existence, and they usually depend on a «patchwork quilt» of support from state and local governments, local businesses, and fundraisers. Nevertheless, some smaller companies have found ways of drawing new audiences. In addition to radio and television broadcasts of opera performances, which have had some success in gaining new audiences, broadcasts of live performances to movie theatres have shown the potential to reach new audiences.^[43]

From musicals back towards opera[edit]

By the late 1930s, some musicals began to be written with a more operatic structure. These works include complex polyphonic ensembles and reflect musical developments of their times. Porgy and Bess (1935), influenced by jazz styles, and Candide (1956), with its sweeping, lyrical passages and farcical parodies of opera, both opened on Broadway but became accepted as part of the opera repertory. Popular musicals such as Show Boat, West Side Story, Brigadoon, Sweeney Todd, Passion, Evita, The Light in the Piazza, The Phantom of the Opera and others tell dramatic stories through complex music and in the 2010s they are sometimes seen in opera houses.^[44] The Most Happy Fella (1952) is quasi-operatic and has been revived by the New York City Opera. Other rock-influenced musicals, such as Tommy (1969) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Les Misérables (1980), Rent (1996), Spring Awakening (2006), and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (2012) employ various operatic conventions, such as through composition, recitative instead of dialogue, and leitmotifs.

Acoustic enhancement in opera[edit]

A subtle type of sound electronic reinforcement called acoustic enhancement is used in some modern concert halls and theatres where operas are performed. Although none of the major opera houses «…use traditional, Broadway-style sound reinforcement, in which most if not all singers are equipped with radio microphones mixed to a series of unsightly loudspeakers scattered throughout the theatre», many use a sound reinforcement system for acoustic enhancement and for subtle boosting of offstage voices, child singers, onstage dialogue, and sound effects (e.g., church bells in Tosca or thunder effects in Wagnerian operas).^[45]

Operatic voices[edit]

Operatic vocal technique evolved, in a time before electronic amplification, to allow singers to produce enough volume to be heard over an orchestra, without the instrumentalists having to substantially compromise their volume.

Vocal classifications[edit]

Singers and the roles they play are classified by voice type, based on the tessitura, agility, power and timbre of their voices. Male singers can be classified by vocal range as bass, bass-baritone, baritone, baritenor, tenor and countertenor, and female singers as contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano. (Men sometimes sing in the «female» vocal ranges, in which case they are termed sopranist or countertenor. The countertenor is commonly encountered in opera, sometimes singing parts written for castrati—men neutered at a young age specifically to give them a higher singing range.) Singers are then further classified by size—for instance, a soprano can be described as a lyric soprano, coloratura, soubrette, spinto, or dramatic soprano. These terms, although not fully describing a singing voice, associate the singer’s voice with the roles most suitable to the singer’s vocal characteristics.

Yet another sub-classification can be made according to acting skills or requirements, for example the basso buffo who often must be a specialist in patter as well as a comic actor. This is carried out in detail in the Fach system of German speaking countries, where historically opera and spoken drama were often put on by the same repertory company.

A particular singer’s voice may change drastically over his or her lifetime, rarely reaching vocal maturity until the third decade, and sometimes not until middle age. Two French voice types, premiere dugazon and deuxieme dugazon, were named after successive stages in the career of Louise-Rosalie Lefebvre (Mme. Dugazon). Other terms originating in the star casting system of the Parisian theatres are baryton-martin and soprano falcon.

Historical use of voice parts[edit]

The following is only intended as a brief overview. For the main articles, see soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor, baritone, bass, countertenor and castrato.

The soprano voice has typically been used as the voice of choice for the female protagonist of the opera since the latter half of the 18th century. Earlier, it was common for that part to be sung by any female voice, or even a castrato. The current emphasis on a wide vocal range was primarily an invention of the Classical period. Before that, the vocal virtuosity, not range, was the priority, with soprano parts rarely extending above a high A (Handel, for example, only wrote one role extending to a high C), though the castrato Farinelli was alleged to possess a top D (his lower range was also extraordinary, extending to tenor C). The mezzo-soprano, a term of comparatively recent origin, also has a large repertoire, ranging from the female lead in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas to such heavyweight roles as Brangäne in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (these are both roles sometimes sung by sopranos; there is quite a lot of movement between these two voice-types). For the true contralto, the range of parts is more limited, which has given rise to the insider joke that contraltos only sing «witches, bitches, and britches» roles. In recent years many of the «trouser roles» from the Baroque era, originally written for women, and those originally sung by castrati, have been reassigned to countertenors.

The tenor voice, from the Classical era onwards, has traditionally been assigned the role of male protagonist. Many of the most challenging tenor roles in the repertory were written during the bel canto era, such as Donizetti’s sequence of 9 Cs above middle C during La fille du régiment. With Wagner came an emphasis on vocal heft for his protagonist roles, with this vocal category described as Heldentenor; this heroic voice had its more Italianate counterpart in such roles as Calaf in Puccini’s Turandot. Basses have a long history in opera, having been used in opera seria in supporting roles, and sometimes for comic relief (as well as providing a contrast to the preponderance of high voices in this genre). The bass repertoire is wide and varied, stretching from the comedy of Leporello in Don Giovanni to the nobility of Wotan in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, to the conflicted King Phillip of Verdi’s Don Carlos. In between the bass and the tenor is the baritone, which also varies in weight from say, Guglielmo in Mozart’s Così fan tutte to Posa in Verdi’s Don Carlos; the actual designation «baritone» was not standard until the mid-19th century.

Famous singers[edit]

Early performances of opera were too infrequent for singers to make a living exclusively from the style, but with the birth of commercial opera in the mid-17th century, professional performers began to emerge. The role of the male hero was usually entrusted to a castrato, and by the 18th century, when Italian opera was performed throughout Europe, leading castrati who possessed extraordinary vocal virtuosity, such as Senesino and Farinelli, became international stars. The career of the first major female star (or prima donna), Anna Renzi, dates to the mid-17th century. In the 18th century, a number of Italian sopranos gained international renown and often engaged in fierce rivalry, as was the case with Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, who started a fistfight with one another during a performance of a Handel opera. The French disliked castrati, preferring their male heroes to be sung by an haute-contre (a high tenor), of which Joseph Legros (1739–1793) was a leading example.^[46]

Though opera patronage has decreased in the last century in favor of other arts and media (such as musicals, cinema, radio, television and recordings), mass media and the advent of recording have supported the popularity of many famous singers including Maria Callas, Enrico Caruso, Amelita Galli-Curci, Kirsten Flagstad, Mario Del Monaco, Renata Tebaldi, Risë Stevens, Alfredo Kraus, Franco Corelli, Montserrat Caballé, Joan Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson, Nellie Melba, Rosa Ponselle, Beniamino Gigli, Jussi Björling, Feodor Chaliapin, Cecilia Bartoli, Renée Fleming, Marilyn Horne, Bryn Terfel, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and The Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras).

Changing role of the orchestra[edit]

Before the 1700s, Italian operas used a small string orchestra, but it rarely played to accompany the singers. Opera solos during this period were accompanied by the basso continuo group, which consisted of the harpsichord, «plucked instruments» such as lute and a bass instrument.^[47] The string orchestra typically only played when the singer was not singing, such as during a singer’s «…entrances and exits, between vocal numbers, [or] for [accompanying] dancing». Another role for the orchestra during this period was playing an orchestral ritornello to mark the end of a singer’s solo.^[47] During the early 1700s, some composers began to use the string orchestra to mark certain aria or recitatives «…as special»; by 1720, most arias were accompanied by an orchestra. Opera composers such as Domenico Sarro, Leonardo Vinci, Giambattista Pergolesi, Leonardo Leo, and Johann Adolf Hasse added new instruments to the opera orchestra and gave the instruments new roles. They added wind instruments to the strings and used orchestral instruments to play instrumental solos, as a way to mark certain arias as special.^[47]

The orchestra has also provided an instrumental overture before the singers come onstage since the 1600s. Peri’s Euridice opens with a brief instrumental ritornello, and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) opens with a toccata, in this case a fanfare for muted trumpets. The French overture as found in Jean-Baptiste Lully’s operas^[48] consist of a slow introduction in a marked «dotted rhythm», followed by a lively movement in fugato style. The overture was frequently followed by a series of dance tunes before the curtain rose. This overture style was also used in English opera, most notably in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Handel also uses the French overture form in some of his Italian operas such as Giulio Cesare.^[49]

In Italy, a distinct form called «overture» arose in the 1680s, and became established particularly through the operas of Alessandro Scarlatti, and spread throughout Europe, supplanting the French form as the standard operatic overture by the mid-18th century.^[50] It uses three generally homophonic movements: fast–slow–fast. The opening movement was normally in duple metre and in a major key; the slow movement in earlier examples was short, and could be in a contrasting key; the concluding movement was dance-like, most often with rhythms of the gigue or minuet, and returned to the key of the opening section. As the form evolved, the first movement may incorporate fanfare-like elements and took on the pattern of so-called «sonatina form» (sonata form without a development section), and the slow section became more extended and lyrical.^[50]

In Italian opera after about 1800, the «overture» became known as the sinfonia.^[51] Fisher also notes the term Sinfonia avanti l’opera (literally, the «symphony before the opera») was «an early term for a sinfonia used to begin an opera, that is, as an overture as opposed to one serving to begin a later section of the work».^[51] In 19th-century opera, in some operas, the overture, Vorspiel, Einleitung, Introduction, or whatever else it may be called, was the portion of the music which takes place before the curtain rises; a specific, rigid form was no longer required for the overture.

The role of the orchestra in accompanying the singers changed over the 19th century, as the Classical style transitioned to the Romantic era. In general, orchestras got bigger, new instruments were added, such as additional percussion instruments (e.g., bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, etc.). The orchestration of orchestra parts also developed over the 19th century. In Wagnerian operas, the forefronting of the orchestra went beyond the overture. In Wagnerian operas such as the Ring Cycle, the orchestra often played the recurrent musical themes or leitmotifs, a role which gave a prominence to the orchestra which «…elevated its status to that of a prima donna».^[52] Wagner’s operas were scored with unprecedented scope and complexity, adding more brass instruments and huge ensemble sizes: indeed, his score to Das Rheingold calls for six harps. In Wagner and the work of subsequent composers, such as Benjamin Britten, the orchestra «often communicates facts about the story that exceed the levels of awareness of the characters therein.» As a result, critics began to regard the orchestra as performing a role analogous to that of a literary narrator.»^[53]

As the role of the orchestra and other instrumental ensembles changed over the history of opera, so did the role of leading the musicians. In the Baroque era, the musicians were usually directed by the harpsichord player, although the French composer Lully is known to have conducted with a long staff. In the 1800s, during the Classical period, the first violinist, also known as the concertmaster, would lead the orchestra while sitting. Over time, some directors began to stand up and use hand and arm gestures to lead the performers. Eventually this role of music director became termed the conductor, and a podium was used to make it easier for all the musicians to see him or her. By the time Wagnerian operas were introduced, the complexity of the works and the huge orchestras used to play them gave the conductor an increasingly important role. Modern opera conductors have a challenging role: they have to direct both the orchestra in the orchestra pit and the singers on stage.

Language and translation issues[edit]

Since the days of Handel and Mozart, many composers have favored Italian as the language for the libretto of their operas. From the Bel Canto era to Verdi, composers would sometimes supervise versions of their operas in both Italian and French. Because of this, operas such as Lucia di Lammermoor or Don Carlos are today deemed canonical in both their French and Italian versions.^[54]

Until the mid-1950s, it was acceptable to produce operas in translations even if these had not been authorized by the composer or the original librettists. For example, opera houses in Italy routinely staged Wagner in Italian.^[55] After World War II, opera scholarship improved, artists refocused on the original versions, and translations fell out of favor. Knowledge of European languages, especially Italian, French, and German, is today an important part of the training for professional singers. «The biggest chunk of operatic training is in linguistics and musicianship», explains mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick. «[I have to understand] not only what I’m singing, but what everyone else is singing. I sing Italian, Czech, Russian, French, German, English.»^[56]

In the 1980s, supertitles (sometimes called surtitles) began to appear. Although supertitles were first almost universally condemned as a distraction,^[57] today many opera houses provide either supertitles, generally projected above the theatre’s proscenium arch, or individual seat screens where spectators can choose from more than one language. TV broadcasts typically include subtitles even if intended for an audience who knows well the language (for example, a RAI broadcast of an Italian opera). These subtitles target not only the hard of hearing but the audience generally, since a sung discourse is much harder to understand than a spoken one—even in the ears of native speakers. Subtitles in one or more languages have become standard in opera broadcasts, simulcasts, and DVD editions.

Today, operas are only rarely performed in translation. Exceptions include the English National Opera, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, and Opera South East,^[58] which favor English translations.^[59] Another exception are opera productions intended for a young audience, such as Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel^[60] and some productions of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.^[61]

Funding[edit]

Outside the US, and especially in Europe, most opera houses receive public subsidies from taxpayers.^[62] In Milan, Italy, 60% of La Scala’s annual budget of €115 million is from ticket sales and private donations, with the remaining 40% coming from public funds.^[63] In 2005, La Scala received 25% of Italy’s total state subsidy of €464 million for the performing arts.^[64] In the UK, Arts Council England provides funds to Opera North, the Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera, and English National Opera. Between 2012 and 2015, these four opera companies along with the English National Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Northern Ballet accounted for 22% of the funds in the Arts Council’s national portfolio. During that period, the Council undertook an analysis of its funding for large-scale opera and ballet companies, setting recommendations and targets for the companies to meet prior to the 2015–2018 funding decisions.^[65] In February 2015, concerns over English National Opera’s business plan led to the Arts Council placing it «under special funding arrangements» in what The Independent termed «the unprecedented step» of threatening to withdraw public funding if the council’s concerns were not met by 2017.^[66] European public funding to opera has led to a disparity between the number of year-round opera houses in Europe and the United States. For example, «Germany has about 80 year-round opera houses [as of 2004], while the U.S., with more than three times the population, does not have any. Even the Met only has a seven-month season.»^[67]

Television, cinema and the Internet[edit]

A milestone for opera broadcasting in the U.S. was achieved on 24 December 1951, with the live broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors, an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti. It was the first opera specifically composed for television in America.^[68] Another milestone occurred in Italy in 1992 when Tosca was broadcast live from its original Roman settings and times of the day: the first act came from the 16th-century Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle at noon on Saturday; the 16th-century Palazzo Farnese was the setting for the second at 8:15 pm; and on Sunday at 6 am, the third act was broadcast from Castel Sant’Angelo. The production was transmitted via satellite to 105 countries.^[69]

Major opera companies have begun presenting their performances in local cinemas throughout the United States and many other countries. The Metropolitan Opera began a series of live high-definition video transmissions to cinemas around the world in 2006.^[70] In 2007, Met performances were shown in over 424 theaters in 350 U.S. cities. La bohème went out to 671 screens worldwide. San Francisco Opera began prerecorded video transmissions in March 2008. As of June 2008, approximately 125 theaters in 117 U.S. cities carry the showings. The HD video opera transmissions are presented via the same HD digital cinema projectors used for major Hollywood films.^[71] European opera houses and festivals including the Royal Opera in London, La Scala in Milan, the Salzburg Festival, La Fenice in Venice, and the Maggio Musicale in Florence have also transmitted their productions to theaters in cities around the world since 2006, including 90 cities in the U.S.^[72][73]

The emergence of the Internet has also affected the way in which audiences consume opera. In 2009 the British Glyndebourne Festival Opera offered for the first time an online digital video download of its complete 2007 production of Tristan und Isolde. In the 2013 season, the festival streamed all six of its productions online.^[74][75] In July 2012, the first online community opera was premiered at the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Titled Free Will, it was created by members of the Internet group Opera By You. Its 400 members from 43 countries wrote the libretto, composed the music, and designed the sets and costumes using the Wreckamovie web platform. Savonlinna Opera Festival provided professional soloists, an 80-member choir, a symphony orchestra, and the stage machinery. It was performed live at the festival and streamed live on the internet.^[76]

See also[edit]

• Lists of operas, including a general list as well as by theme, by country, by medium, and by venue
• List of fictional literature featuring opera
• Opera management
• Radio opera

References[edit]

Notes[edit]

Sources

• Apel, Willi, ed. (1969). Harvard Dictionary of Music (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-37501-7.
• Cooke, Mervyn (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-78009-8. See also Google Books partial preview.

Further reading[edit]

• The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie (1992), 5,448 pages, is the best, and by far the largest, general reference in the English language. ISBN 0-333-73432-7, 1-56159-228-5
• The Viking Opera Guide, edited by Amanda Holden (1994), 1,328 pages, ISBN 0-670-81292-7
• The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. Roger Parker (1994)
• The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, by John Warrack and Ewan West (1992), 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5
• Opera, the Rough Guide, by Matthew Boyden et al. (1997), 672 pages, ISBN 1-85828-138-5
• Opera: A Concise History, by Leslie Orrey and Rodney Milnes, World of Art, Thames & Hudson
• Abbate, Carolyn; Parker, Roger (2012). A History of Opera. New York: W W Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-05721-8.
• DiGaetani, John Louis: An Invitation to the Opera, Anchor Books, 1986/91. ISBN 0-385-26339-2.
• Dorschel, Andreas, ‘The Paradox of Opera’, The Cambridge Quarterly 30 (2001), no. 4, pp. 283–306. ISSN 0008-199X (print). ISSN 1471-6836 (electronic). Discusses the aesthetics of opera.
• Silke Leopold, «The Idea of National Opera, c. 1800», United and Diversity in European Culture c. 1800, ed. Tim Blanning and Hagen Schulze (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19–34.
• MacMurray, Jessica M. and Allison Brewster Franzetti: The Book of 101 Opera Librettos: Complete Original Language Texts with English Translations, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1996. ISBN 978-1-884822-79-7
• Howard Mayer Brown, «Opera», The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2001. Oxford University Press
• Rous, Samuel Holland (1919). The Victrola Book of the Opera. Stories of The Operas with Illustrations…. Camden, New Jersey: Victor Talking Machine Company. View at Internet Archive.
• Simon, Henry W.: A Treasury of Grand Opera, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1946.
• «Opera», Herbert Weinstock and Barbara Russano Hanning, Encyclopædia Britannica
• Valls, María Antonia (1989). Hitos de la Música Universal y Retratos de sus Grandes Protagonistas. (Illustrated by Willi Glasauer). Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores.

External links[edit]

• Comprehensive opera performances database, Operabase
• Opera-Inside, opera and aria guides, biographies, history
• StageAgent – synopses and character descriptions for most major operas
• What’s it about? – Opera plot summaries
• Vocabulaire de l’Opéra (in French)
• OperaGlass, a resource at Stanford University
• HistoricOpera – historic operatic images
• «America’s Opera Boom» By Jonathan Leaf, The American, July/August 2007 Issue
• Opera~Opera article archives
• «A History of Opera». Theatre and Performance. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 15 February 2011.

English[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈɒp.əɹ.ə/, /ˈɒp.ɹə/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈɑ.pəɹ.ə/, /ˈɑ.pɹə/

Etymology 1[edit]

Borrowed from Italian opera. Doublet of oeuvre and ure.

Noun[edit]

opera (countable and uncountable, plural operas or opere)

1. (music) A theatrical work, combining drama, music, song and sometimes dance.
2. (music) The score for such a work.
3. A building designed for the performance of such works; an opera house.

   • 1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter VI, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC:

     “I don’t mean all of your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, […], the jewelled animals whose moral code is the code of the barnyard—!»

4. A company dedicated to performing such works.
5. (by extension) Any showy, melodramatic or unrealistic production resembling an opera.

Derived terms[edit]

[edit]

Translations[edit]

See also[edit]

• aria
• ballet
• masque
• melodrama
• musical comedy
• oratorio
• recitative
• singspiel
• Appendix:Glossary of opera

Etymology 2[edit]

From Latin opera, plural of opus.

Noun[edit]

opera

1. plural of opus; a collection of work.

Anagrams[edit]

• pareo

Azerbaijani[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

opera (definite accusative operanı, plural operalar)

1. opera

Declension[edit]

Declension of opera
	singular	plural
nominative	opera	operalar
definite accusative	operanı	operaları
dative	operaya	operalara
locative	operada	operalarda
ablative	operadan	operalardan
definite genitive	operanın	operaların

Possessive forms of opera
	nominative
singular	plural
mənim (“my”)	operam	operalarım
sənin (“your”)	operan	operaların
onun (“his/her/its”)	operası	operaları
bizim (“our”)	operamız	operalarımız
sizin (“your”)	operanız	operalarınız
onların (“their”)	operası or operaları	operaları
	accusative
singular	plural
mənim (“my”)	operamı	operalarımı
sənin (“your”)	operanı	operalarını
onun (“his/her/its”)	operasını	operalarını
bizim (“our”)	operamızı	operalarımızı
sizin (“your”)	operanızı	operalarınızı
onların (“their”)	operasını or operalarını	operalarını
	dative
singular	plural
mənim (“my”)	operama	operalarıma
sənin (“your”)	operana	operalarına
onun (“his/her/its”)	operasına	operalarına
bizim (“our”)	operamıza	operalarımıza
sizin (“your”)	operanıza	operalarınıza
onların (“their”)	operasına or operalarına	operalarına
	locative
singular	plural
mənim (“my”)	operamda	operalarımda
sənin (“your”)	operanda	operalarında
onun (“his/her/its”)	operasında	operalarında
bizim (“our”)	operamızda	operalarımızda
sizin (“your”)	operanızda	operalarınızda
onların (“their”)	operasında or operalarında	operalarında
	ablative
singular	plural
mənim (“my”)	operamdan	operalarımdan
sənin (“your”)	operandan	operalarından
onun (“his/her/its”)	operasından	operalarından
bizim (“our”)	operamızdan	operalarımızdan
sizin (“your”)	operanızdan	operalarınızdan
onların (“their”)	operasından or operalarından	operalarından
	genitive
singular	plural
mənim (“my”)	operamın	operalarımın
sənin (“your”)	operanın	operalarının
onun (“his/her/its”)	operasının	operalarının
bizim (“our”)	operamızın	operalarımızın
sizin (“your”)	operanızın	operalarınızın
onların (“their”)	operasının or operalarının	operalarının

Basque[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from Spanish ópera, from Italian opera.

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /opeɾa/, [o̞.pe̞.ɾa]

Noun[edit]

opera inan

1. opera (theatrical work, score)
2. opera (score)
3. opera (building)

Declension[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• «opera» in Euskaltzaindiaren Hiztegia [Dictionary of the Basque Academy], euskaltzaindia.eus
• “opera” in Orotariko Euskal Hiztegia [General Basque Dictionary], euskaltzaindia.eus

Catalan[edit]

Verb[edit]

opera

1. third-person singular present indicative form of operar
2. second-person singular imperative form of operar

Czech[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): [ˈopɛra]

Noun[edit]

opera f

1. opera

[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• opera in Příruční slovník jazyka českého, 1935–1957
• opera in Slovník spisovného jazyka českého, 1960–1971, 1989
• opera in Akademický slovník cizích slov, 1995, at prirucka.ujc.cas.cz

Dutch[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from Italian opera, from Latin opera, plural of opus.

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /ˈoː.pəˌraː/
• Hyphenation: ope‧ra

Noun[edit]

opera f (plural opera’s, diminutive operaatje n)

1. opera

Derived terms[edit]

• operacomponist
• rockopera
• operazanger
• operazangeres

[edit]

• oeuvre
• operette
• opus

Esperanto[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From opero (“opera”) +‎ -a.

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): [oˈpera]
• Rhymes: -era
• Hyphenation: o‧pe‧ra

Adjective[edit]

opera (accusative singular operan, plural operaj, accusative plural operajn)

1. of or relating to opera

Hungarian[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from Italian opera, from Latin opera.^[1]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): [ˈopɛrɒ]
• Hyphenation: ope‧ra
• Rhymes: -rɒ

Noun[edit]

opera (plural operák)

1. (music) opera (a theatrical work combining drama, music, song and sometimes dance)

   Synonyms: dalmű, zenedráma

2. (music) opera, opera house (building designed for the performance of such works)

   Synonyms: operaház, dalszínház

Declension[edit]

Inflection (stem in long/high vowel, back harmony)
	singular	plural
nominative	opera	operák
accusative	operát	operákat
dative	operának	operáknak
instrumental	operával	operákkal
causal-final	operáért	operákért
translative	operává	operákká
terminative	operáig	operákig
essive-formal	operaként	operákként
essive-modal	—	—
inessive	operában	operákban
superessive	operán	operákon
adessive	operánál	operáknál
illative	operába	operákba
sublative	operára	operákra
allative	operához	operákhoz
elative	operából	operákból
delative	operáról	operákról
ablative	operától	operáktól
non-attributive possessive — singular	operáé	operáké
non-attributive possessive — plural	operáéi	operákéi

Possessive forms of opera
possessor	single possession	multiple possessions
1st person sing.	operám	operáim
2nd person sing.	operád	operáid
3rd person sing.	operája	operái
1st person plural	operánk	operáink
2nd person plural	operátok	operáitok
3rd person plural	operájuk	operáik

Derived terms[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• opera in Bárczi, Géza and László Országh. A magyar nyelv értelmező szótára (‘The Explanatory Dictionary of the Hungarian Language’, abbr.: ÉrtSz.). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1959–1962. Fifth ed., 1992: →ISBN

Italian[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /ˈɔ.pe.ra/
• Rhymes: -ɔpera
• Hyphenation: ò‧pe‧ra

Etymology 1[edit]

From Latin opera.

Noun[edit]

opera f (plural opere)

1. work

   Synonym: lavoro

2. means, help, services

   Synonyms: mezzo, aiuto, servigi

3. (music) opus
4. (music) opera

   Synonym: melodramma

5. institution, institute, society

   Synonyms: istituzione, istituto

Derived terms[edit]

[edit]

• manodopera
• operaio
• operare
• operetta
• operista
• operoso

Etymology 2[edit]

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

Verb[edit]

opera

1. inflection of operare:
   1. third-person singular present indicative
   2. second-person singular imperative

Anagrams[edit]

• pareo

Ladin[edit]

Noun[edit]

opera f (plural operes)

1. work

Latin[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From operis +‎ -a, genitive singular inflection of opus.

Pronunciation[edit]

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /ˈo.pe.ra/, [ˈɔpɛrä]
• (Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /ˈo.pe.ra/, [ˈɔːperä]

Noun[edit]

opera f (genitive operae); first declension

1. work, exertion, effort

   Synonyms: cōnātus, opus, studium, labor, cūra, intēnsiō, mōlēs, pulvis

   operae non est (+ infinitive) ― there is no need to, there is no time to

   • 44 BCE, Cicero, De Officiis 2.4.14:

     Quī dēnique ex bēstiīs frūctūs aut quae commoditās, nisi hominēs adiuvārent, percipī posset? Nam et quī prīncipēs inveniendī fuērunt, quem ex quāque bēluā ūsum habēre possēmus, hominēs certē fuērunt, nec hōc tempore sine hominum operā aut pāscere eās aut domāre aut tuērī aut tempestīvōs frūctūs ex iīs capere possēmus; ab eīsdemque et, quae nocent, interficiuntur et, quae ūsuī possunt esse, capiuntur.

     What produce of beasts, then, or what commodity could be obtained, if men didn’t assist? For those that first found out what use we can have from each beast, were surely humans, and we cannot in the present either pasture them or break them in or take care of them or obtain the timely fruit from them without the labour of humans; and by the same are killed those who do harm and captured those that can be of use.

2. service
   • 62 BCE – 43 BCE, Cicero, Epistulae ad familiārēs 13.9.3:

     […] Cn. Pūpium, quī est in operīs eius societātis […]

     […] Gnaeus Pupius, who is in the service of that association […]

3. (especially with dō) care, attention bestowed on something (or someone, especially a teacher)
   1. with dative

      • 163 BCE, Publius Terentius Afer, Heauton Timorumenos 1.1.58–60:

        Ego ĭstūc aetātis nōn amōrī operam dabam
        sed in Asiam hinc abiī propter pauperiem atque ibī
        simul rem et glōriam armīs bellī repperī.

        When I was your age I wasn’t giving much attention to love
        but instead I left for Asia because of poverty and there
        I found fortune and glory by the arms of war.

      • 121 CE, Suetonius, De vita Caesarum 1.4.1:

        Cēterum, compositā sēditiōne cīvīlī, Cornēlium Dolabellam cōnsularem et triumphālem repetundārum postulāvit; absolūtōque Rhōdum sēcēdere statuit, et ad dēclīnandam invidiam et ut per ōtium ac requiem Apollōniō Molōnī clārissimō tunc dīcendī magistrō operam daret.

        Then, with the civil unrest quietened, he charged Cornelius Dolabella, former consul who had triumphed, with extortion; with him acquitted, he resolved to leave for Rhodes, to escape the hate as well as to pay attention in rest and recreation to Apollonius Molon, then the most distinguished teacher of speaking.

   2. (uncommon) with ad + accusative

      • c. 180 BCE, Plautus, Casina pro.21–22:

        Vōs omnīs opere magnō esse ōrātōs volō
        benignē ut operam dētis ad nostrum gregem.

        I want you all to be asked with great care
        to kindly give attention to our company of actors.

   3. with ut/nē + subjunctive

      • c. 4 BCE – 65 CE, Seneca the Younger, De vita beata 2.3:

        Omnem operam dedī, ut mē multitūdinī ēdūcerem et aliquā dōte nōtābilem facerem.

        I took all the care to withdraw myself from the multitude and by some talent make myself distinguished.

      • c. 48 BCE, Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Civili 1.5.3:

        Dent operam cōnsulēs, praetōrēs, tribūnī plēbis—quīque prō cōnsulibus sunt ad urbem—nē quid rēs pūblica dētrimentī capiat.

        May the consuls, praetors, tribunes of the people—and those who are near the City—take care that nothing bad happens to the Republic.

   4. with the subjunctive alone
      • 62 BCE – 43 BCE, Cicero, Epistulae ad familiārēs 10.21.6:

        Ut exercitum locīs habeam opportūnīs, prōvinciam tuear, etiam sī ille exercitus descīerit, omniaque integra servem dabō operam, quoad exercitūs hōc summittātis parīque fēlīcitāte rem pūblicam hīc vindicētis.

        I shall take care to keep the army in suitable locations, to protect my province even if that army defects, and to preserve the whole position uncompromised, until you send armies to my support and defend the commonwealth with just as much success.

   5. (Old Latin, rare) with the infinitive

      • 165 BCE, Publius Terentius Afer, Hecyra 4.1.37–38:

        Sī modestē ac rārō haec fēcit, nōnne ea dissimulāre nōs
        magis hūmānum est quam dare operam id scīre, quī nōs ōderit?

        If he did these things reasonably and unfrequently, would it not be more human
        to turn a blind eye to that than take the trouble to find out, due to which he might hate us?

4. (in the ablative and with possesive pronouns) one’s fault, agency, doing

   • c. 200 BCE – 190 BCE, Plautus, Captivi 3.5.19–22:

     TYNDARUS. Fateor, omnia
     facta esse ita ut tū dīcis, et fallāciīs
     abiisse eum abs tē meā operā atque astūtiā;
     an, obsecrō hercle tē, id nunc suscēnsēs mihī?

     TYNDARUS. I confess that all
     were done just like you say, and by deceit
     he went away from you by my doing and astuteness;
     and, please, by Hercules, now you are inflamed at me?

5. (Old Latin) (in the ablative, with experior) one’s own experience

   • c. 195 BCE, Plautus, Trinummus 4.1.5–8:

     Atque ego, Neptūne, tibi ante aliōs deōs grātiās agō atque abeō summās;
     nam tē omnēs saevomque sevērumque atque āvidīs mōribus commemorant,
     spurcificum, immānem, intolerandum, vēsānum: contrā operā expertus,
     nam pol placidō tē et clementī meō ūsque modō, ut voluī, ūsus sum in altō.

     And I, Neptune, give thanks to you above other gods and in the highest;
     for all remember you cruel and strict and with the greediest character,
     obscene, frightful, intolerable, crazy: unlike how I’ve known you in my experience,
     for, by Pollux, in my own gentle and merciful way have I benefitted from you, as I wanted, at sea.

6. (Old Latin) (with ūnā or eādem) manner, way

   • c. 200 BCE – 190 BCE, Plautus, Captivi 3.4.30–31:

     Et quidem Alcumeus atque Orestēs et Lycurgus posteā
     ūnā operā mihi sunt sodālēs quā iste.

     And then Alcumeus and Orestes and Lycurgus
     are my friends in the same manner as this one is.

7. spare time for something (see #Usage notes)
   • c. 60 BCE – 54 BCE, Cicero, Epistulae ad Quīntum frātrem 3.4.4:

     Dē versibus quōs tibi ā mē scrībī vīs, dēest mihi quidem opera sed abest etiam ἐνθουσιασμός, quī nōn modo tempus sed etiam animum vacuum ab omnī cūrā dēsīderat.

     Regarding the verses which you want composed by me to you, I don’t have the time, but the afflatus is absent too, which needs not only time but also a soul empty of every worry.

   • 27 BCE – 25 BCE, Titus Livius, Ab urbe condita libri 4.8.3:

     Ortum autem initium est reī, quod in populō per multōs annōs incēnsō neque differrī cēnsus poterat neque cōnsulibus, cum tot populōrum bella imminerent, operae erat id negōtium agere.

     The beginning of the office appeared because in the people devastated in the course of many years neither could a census be held, nor was it worth the time of the consuls when wars from so many tribes were threatening.

8. a day’s labour

   • 4 CE – c. 70 CE, Columella, De Re Rustica 2.12.18:

     Cētera legūmina occupant operās sexāgintā, id est mēnsēs duōs.

     The other vegetables require sixty days’ work, that is, two months.

9. (metonymically) day labourer, farmhand
   • BCE 30, Horace, Satires 2.7.117–118:

     […] Ōcius hinc tē
     nī rapis, accēdēs opera agrō nōna Sabīnō.

     […] If you don’t make off
     from here faster, you’ll become the ninth farmhand on the Sabine field.

   1. (by extension) any kind of worker

      • c. 77 CE – 79 CE, Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 33.72–73:

        Et tamen in silice facilior existimātur opera; est namque terra ex quōdam argillae genere glāreā mixta—gangadiam vocant—prope inexpugnābilis. Cuneīs eam ferreīs adgrediuntur et īsdem malleīs, nihilque dūrius putant, nisi quod inter omnia aurī famēs dūrissima est. Perāctō opere cervīcēs fornicum ab ultimō caedunt. Dat signum rīma, eamque sōlus intellegit in cacūmine eius montis vigil. Hic vōce, nūtū ēvocārī iubet operās pariterque ipse dēvolat. Mōns frāctus cadit ab sēsē longē fragōre quī concipī hūmānā mente nōn possit, aeque et flātū incrēdībilī. Spectant victōrēs ruīnam nātūrae. Nec tamen adhūc aurum est nec sciēre esse, cum fōderent, tantaque ad perīcula et inpendia satis causae fuit sperāre quod cuperent.

        And still the work is considered to be easier in flint; for there is earth, consisting of some kind of clay, mixed with gravel—they call it gangadia—almost impenetrable. They approach it with iron wedges and with the same hammer machines [as above], and they consider nothing harder, save for the fact that hunger for gold is the hardest among all things. With the work done, they cut down the supports of the arched roofs beginning from the last one. A fissure gives the sign, and only the watchman in the peak of that mountain notices it. He orders by voice and by gesture the miners to be called outside, and rushes down in the same manner. At a distance, the mountain, broken, falls by itself with a crash which cannot be conceived by the human mind, and with an incredible blast as well. The victors watch the ruin of nature. And the gold is not even there yet, nor did they know whether there was any when they were digging, and hoping for what they desired was enough of a reason to go through all these dangers and expenses.

   2. (derogatory, politics) hired aider, tool, rowdy

      • 121 CE, Suetonius, De vita Caesarum 2.3.1:

        C. Octāvius pater a prīncipiō aetātis et rē et existimātiōne magnā fuit, ut equidem mīrer hunc quoque ā nōnnūllīs argentārium atque etiam inter dīvīsōrēs operāsque campestrēs prōditum; amplīs enim innūtrītus opibus honōrēs et adeptus est facile et ēgregiē administrāvit.

        The father Gaius Octavius was from the beginning of his age of great wealth as well as reputation, so that I wonder that he too is alleged by some to have been a money-changer and even among the electoral bribe distributors and aiders in the Campus Martius; for, brought up with ample riches, he obtained honours with ease as well as administering them excellently.

10. deed, activity, effort

    • 27 BCE – 25 BCE, Titus Livius, Ab urbe condita libri 41.4.6:

      Ante omnēs īnsignis operā fuit C. Popilī equitis; Sabellō cognōmen erat. Is pede sauciō relictus longē plūrimōs hostium occīdit.

      More distinguished than others in deeds was Gaius Popilius the knight; Sabello was his cognomen. He, left behind with a wounded leg, killed the most enemies by far.

11. handiwork

    • c. 209 BCE, Plautus, Asinaria 2.4.18–19:

      Iussīn, sceleste, ab iānuā hoc stercus hinc auferrī?
      Iussīn columnīs dēicī operās araneōrum?

      Didn’t I order, you scoundrel, this dung to be carried away from the door?
      Didn’t I order the handiwork of spiders to be removed from the columns?

Usage notes[edit]

The word, in its “spare time” meaning, is frequently used in the ante-classic period, and especially by Plautus, in the locution operae esse, meaning ‘to be worth the time’. Later on, it is characteristic of Livy’s style and of the archaising tendencies of Silver Latin.

Declension[edit]

First-declension noun.

Case	Singular	Plural
Nominative	opera	operae
Genitive	operae	operārum
Dative	operae	operīs
Accusative	operam	operās
Ablative	operā	operīs
Vocative	opera	operae

[edit]

• opella
• operor
• operae prētium

Descendants[edit]

Noun[edit]

opera

1. nominative/accusative plural of opus

References[edit]

• «opera», in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• «opera», in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• opera in Enrico Olivetti, editor (2003-2023) Dizionario Latino, Olivetti Media Communication
• opera in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)

Latvian[edit]

Noun[edit]

opera f (4 declension)

1. opera

Declension[edit]

Lithuanian[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): [ˈôːpɛrɐ]

Noun[edit]

ópera f (plural óperos) stress pattern 1

1. opera

Declension[edit]

Norwegian Bokmål[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Italian opera (per musica).

Noun[edit]

opera m (definite singular operaen, indefinite plural operaer, definite plural operaene)

1. an opera
2. an opera house (also operahus)

Derived terms[edit]

• operahus
• operasanger, operasangerinne
• såpeopera

References[edit]

• “opera” in The Bokmål Dictionary.

Norwegian Nynorsk[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Italian opera (per musica).

Noun[edit]

opera m (definite singular operaen, indefinite plural operaer or operaar, definite plural operaene or operaane)

1. an opera
2. an opera house (also operahus)

Derived terms[edit]

• operahus
• såpeopera

References[edit]

• “opera” in The Nynorsk Dictionary.

Polish[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from Italian opera, from Latin opera.

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /ɔˈpɛ.ra/
• Rhymes: -ɛra
• Syllabification: o‧pe‧ra

Noun[edit]

opera f

1. (music) opera (theatrical work)
2. (architecture) opera house (building)

Declension[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• opera in Wielki słownik języka polskiego, Instytut Języka Polskiego PAN
• opera in Polish dictionaries at PWN

Portuguese[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• Hyphenation: o‧pe‧ra
• Rhymes: -ɛɾɐ

Verb[edit]

opera

1. inflection of operar:
   1. third-person singular present indicative
   2. second-person singular imperative

Romanian[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From French opérer, from Latin operare.

Verb[edit]

a opera (third-person singular present operează, past participle operat) 1st conj.

1. to operate

Conjugation[edit]

Serbo-Croatian[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Italian opera, from Latin opera.

Noun[edit]

ȍpera f (Cyrillic spelling о̏пера)

1. opera

Declension[edit]

Spanish[edit]

Verb[edit]

opera

1. inflection of operar:
   1. third-person singular present indicative
   2. second-person singular imperative

Swahili[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

opera (n class, plural opera)

1. opera

Swedish[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

opera c

1. an opera; a musical theatre play
2. an opera house; an institution or building where opera is performed

Declension[edit]

Declension of opera
	Singular	Plural
Indefinite	Definite	Indefinite	Definite
Nominative	opera	operan	operor	operorna
Genitive	operas	operans	operors	operornas

[edit]

• operaföreställning
• operahus
• operett

See also[edit]

• libretto
• musikal

Tagalog[edit]

Etymology 1[edit]

Borrowed from Spanish operar (“to operate”). Doublet of ubra.

Pronunciation[edit]

• Hyphenation: o‧pe‧ra
• IPA^(key): /ʔopeˈɾa/, [ʔo.peˈɾa]

Noun[edit]

operá (Baybayin spelling ᜂᜉᜒᜇ)

1. (medicine) act of operating (in surgery)

Derived terms[edit]

[edit]

• operado/operada

Etymology 2[edit]

Borrowed from Spanish ópera (“opera”). Doublet of obra.

Pronunciation[edit]

• Hyphenation: o‧pe‧ra
• IPA^(key): /ˈʔopeɾa/, [ˈʔo.pe.ɾɐ]

Noun[edit]

óperá (Baybayin spelling ᜂᜉᜒᜇ)

1. (music) opera

[edit]

• operasyon
• opereta

Further reading[edit]

• “opera”, in Pambansang Diksiyonaryo | Diksiyonaryo.ph, Manila: Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, 2018

Turkish[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Ottoman Turkish اوپرا, اوپره (opera), from Italian opera, from Latin opera.

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /ɔ.pe.ɾa/

Noun[edit]

opera (definite accusative operayı, plural operalar)

1. opera

Declension[edit]

Inflection
Nominative	opera
Definite accusative	operayı
	Singular	Plural
Nominative	opera	operalar
Definite accusative	operayı	operaları
Dative	operaya	operalara
Locative	operada	operalarda
Ablative	operadan	operalardan
Genitive	operanın	operaların

Welsh[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From English opera.

Noun[edit]

opera f (plural operâu)

1. opera

[edit]

• operatig (“operatic”)

Mutation[edit]

Welsh mutation
radical	soft	nasal	h-prothesis
opera	unchanged	unchanged	hopera
Note: Some of these forms may be hypothetical. Not every possible mutated form of every word actually occurs.

Further reading[edit]

• R. J. Thomas, G. A. Bevan, P. J. Donovan, A. Hawke et al., editors (1950–present), “opera”, in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru Online (in Welsh), University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies

An opera is a theatrical piece that tells a story totally through the music. We get the word opera from the Latin and, later, from the Italian, a noun formed from the word operari, “to work.” The style evolved in Italy around 1600, and was initially unrealistic, mainly a chance for soloists to show off.

How do you spell opera music?

noun. an extended dramatic composition, in which all parts are sung to instrumental accompaniment, that usually includes arias, choruses, and recitatives, and that sometimes includes ballet. Compare comic opera, grand opera. the form or branch of musical and dramatic art represented by such compositions.

Is opera a word?

The Italian word opera means “work”, both in the sense of the labour done and the result produced. The Italian word derives from the Latin word opera, a singular noun meaning “work” and also the plural of the noun opus.

What is a female opera singer called?

soprano

What are the words in an opera called?

LIBRETTO: The text or words of an opera.

What is the first act of an opera called?

Overture

What is a opera solo called?

aria

What is a short opera song called?

short operatic song
Short operatic song
	ARIETTA
Short operatic solos
	ARIETTAS

What is the end of an opera called?

Finale

What is the difference between an art song and opera?

Art song is a vocalist accompanied by only piano, with no costumes. An opera is a vocalist accompanied by a full orchestra, with costumes and that whole get up. Art songs will be written for voice. However, the instruments/instrument can be whatever the composer chooses.

What is the main focus of art songs?

“An art song strives to be the perfect combination of music and literature, based on four elements: poet, composer, singer and accompanist. The composer uses the full resources of the art form to embellish the poet’s text, sometimes even realizing potential interpretations that were not explicit in the poet’s words.

What is the difference between opera and oratorio?

An oratorio is a large musical composition for orchestra, choir, and soloists. However, opera is musical theatre, while oratorio is strictly a concert piece—though oratorios are sometimes staged as operas, and operas are sometimes presented in concert form.

What is a classical art song?

An art song is a vocal music composition, usually written for one voice with piano accompaniment, and usually in the classical tradition. By extension, the term “art song” is used to refer to the genre of such songs.

What does Nocturne mean?

Nocturne, (French: “Nocturnal”), in music, a composition inspired by, or evocative of, the night, and cultivated in the 19th century primarily as a character piece for piano.

What is a song cycle example?

Two of the earliest examples of the German song cycle were composed in 1816: Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (Op. 98), and Die Temperamente beim Verluste der Geliebten (J. 200-3, /Op. Schubert’s Schwanengesang (1828), though collected posthumously, is also frequently performed as a cycle.

What is European art song?

Based on what we’ve discussed so far, an art song might be defined as “a poem set to music, usually for trained voice and piano accompaniment with a duration of about three minutes.” The German word for such classical song is Lied (singular) and Lieder (plural), so that you will hear the terms “art song,” “lied” and ” …

Who is the father of Kundiman?

composer Francisco Santiago

What are German art songs called?

Lieder

Who wrote the first art song?

In 1816, Ludwig van Beethoven had the idea of writing a set of six Lieder with an overarching narrative: his An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). This new genre came to be known as a Liederkries, or in English, a song cycle.

What accompaniment they used for art song?

Art songs, by contrast, are intended for performance by professional, or at least carefully taught, singers, generally accompanied by piano or instrumental ensemble. The notes are written down, and notes and words are thereafter resistant to casual alteration.

Is music an art?

Music is an art that, in one guise or another, permeates every human society. Modern music is heard in a bewildering profusion of styles, many of them contemporary, others engendered in past eras.

What is the order of voices from highest to lowest?

Common Opera voice types

• Soprano. For females, the highest voice type is the soprano.
• Mezzo-soprano. The mezzo-soprano has a lower range than the soprano.
• Contralto or Alto. The contralto or alto is the lowest female voice and the darkest in timbre.
• Tenor.
• Countertenor.
• Baritone.
• Bass.

What are the 6 types of voices highest to lowest?

A selection of singers share their skills from the lowest voice type to the highest, demonstrating the power of the bass, baritone, tenor, mezzo-soprano, countertenor and soprano voices.

Opera is a form of theater in which the drama is conveyed wholly or predominantly through music and singing. Opera emerged in Italy around the year 1600 and is generally associated with the Western classical music tradition. Opera uses many of the elements of spoken theater such as scenery, costumes, and acting. Generally, however, opera is distinguished from other dramatic forms by the importance of song and conventions of vocal technique. The singers are accompanied by a musical ensemble ranging from a small instrumental ensemble to a full symphonic orchestra. Opera may also incorporate dance; this was especially true of French opera for much of its history.

Background of Opera

Comparable art forms from various other parts of the world, many of them ancient in origin, exist and are also sometimes called «opera» by analogy, usually prefaced with an adjective indicating the region (for example, Chinese opera). These independent traditions are not derivative of Western opera, but are rather distinct forms of musical theatre. Opera is also not the only type of Western musical theatre: in the ancient world, Greek drama featured singing and instrumental accompaniment; and in modern times, other forms such as the musical have appeared.

Operatic terminology

The words of an opera are known as the libretto (literally «little book»). Some composers, notably Richard Wagner, have written their own libretti; others have worked in close collaboration with their librettists, e.g. Mozart with Lorenzo da Ponte. Traditional opera consists of two modes of singing: recitative, the plot-driving passages often sung in a non-melodic style characteristic of opera, and aria (an «air» or formal song) in which the characters express their emotions in a more structured melodic style. Duets, trios and other ensembles often occur, and choruses are used to comment on the action. In some forms of opera, such as Singspiel, opéra comique, operetta, and semi-opera, the recitative is mostly replaced by spoken dialogue. Melodic or semi-melodic passages occurring in the midst of, or instead of, recitative, are also referred to as ‘arioso’. During the Baroque and Classical periods, recitative could appear in two basic forms: secco (dry) recitative, accompanied only by «continuo,» which was often no more than a harpsichord; or accompagnato (also known as «stromentato») in which the orchestra provided accompaniment. By the nineteenth century, accompagnato had gained the upper hand, the orchestra played a much bigger role, and Richard Wagner revolutionised opera by abolishing almost all distinction between aria and recitative in his quest for what he termed «endless melody.» Subsequent composers have tended to follow Wagner’s example, though some, such as Stravinsky in his The Rake’s Progress have bucked the trend. The terminology of the various kinds of operatic voices is described in Section 3 below.^[1]

History

Origins

The word opera means «works» in Italian (from the plural of Latin opus meaning «work» or «labour») suggesting that it combines the arts of solo and choral singing, declamation, acting and dancing in a staged spectacle. Dafne by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today. It was written around 1597, largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the «Florentine Camerata.» Significantly, Dafne was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. The members of the Camerata considered that the «chorus» parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of «restoring» this situation. Dafne is unfortunately lost. A later work by Peri, the opera Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day. The honour of being the first opera still to be regularly performed, however, goes to Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo, composed for the court of Mantua in 1607.^[2]

Italian opera

The Baroque era

Opera did not remain confined to court audiences for long; in 1637 the idea of a «season» (Carnival) of publicly-attended operas supported by ticket sales emerged in Venice. Monteverdi had moved to the city from Mantua and composed his last operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea, for the Venetian theatre in the 1640s. His most important follower Francesco Cavalli helped spread opera throughout Italy. In these early Baroque operas, broad comedy was blended with tragic elements in a mix that jarred some educated sensibilities, sparking the first of opera’s many reform movements, sponsored by Venice’s Arcadian Academy which came to be associated with the poet Metastasio, whose libretti helped crystallize the genre of opera seria, which became the leading form of Italian opera until the end of the eighteenth century. Once the Metastasian ideal had been firmly established, comedy in Baroque-era opera was reserved for what came to be called opera buffa.^[3]

Opera seria was elevated in tone and highly stylised in form, usually consisting of secco recitative interspersed with long da capo arias. These afforded great opportunity for virtuosic singing and during the golden age of opera seria the singer really became the star. The role of the hero was usually written for the ‘castrato’ voice; castrati such as Farinelli and Senesino, as well as female sopranos such as Faustina Bordoni, became in great demand throughout Europe as opera seria ruled the stage in every country except France. Italian opera set the Baroque standard. Italian libretti were the norm, even when a German composer like Handel found himself writing for London audiences. Italian libretti remained dominant in the classical period as well, for example in the operas of Mozart, who wrote in Vienna near the century’s close. Leading Italian-born composers of opera seria include Alessandro Scarlatti, Vivaldi and Porpora.^[4]

Reform: Gluck, the attack on the Metastasian ideal, and Mozart

Opera seria had its weaknesses and critics, and the taste for embellishment on behalf of the superbly trained singers, and the use of spectacle as a replacement for dramatic purity and unity drew attacks. Francesco Algarotti’s Essay on the Opera (1755) proved to be an inspiration for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s reforms. He advocated that opera seria had to return to basics and that all the various elements—music (both instrumental and vocal), ballet, and staging—must be subservient to the overriding drama. Several composers of the period, including Niccolò Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta, attempted to put these ideals into practice. The first to really succeed and to leave a permanent imprint upon the history of opera, however, was Gluck. Gluck tried to achieve a «beautiful simplicity.» This is illustrated in the first of his «reform» operas, Orfeo ed Euridice, where vocal lines lacking in the virtuosity of (say) Handel’s works are supported by simple harmonies and a notably richer-than-usual orchestral presence throughout.

Gluck’s reforms have had resonance throughout operatic history. Weber, Mozart and Wagner, in particular, were influenced by his ideals. Mozart, in many ways Gluck’s successor, combined a superb sense of drama, harmony, melody, and counterpoint to write a series of comedies, notably Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni (in collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte) which remain among the most-loved, popular and well-known operas today. But Mozart’s contribution to opera seria was more mixed; by his time it was dying away, and in spite of such fine works as Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito, he would not succeed in bringing the art form back to life again.^[5]

Bel canto, Verdi and verismo

The ‘bel canto’ opera movement flourished in the early nineteenth century and is exemplified by the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Pacini, Mercadante and many others. Literally «beautiful singing,» bel canto opera derives from the Italian stylistic singing school of the same name. Bel canto lines are typically florid and intricate, requiring supreme agility and pitch control.

Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly popularized by Giuseppe Verdi, beginning with his biblical opera Nabucco. Verdi’s operas resonated with the growing spirit of Italian nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era, and he quickly became an icon of the patriotic movement (although his own politics were perhaps not quite so radical). In the early 1850s, Verdi produced his three most popular operas: Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. But he continued to develop his style, composing perhaps the greatest French Grand opera, Don Carlos, and ending his career with two Shakespeare-inspired works, Otello and the opera Falstaff, which reveal how far Italian opera had grown in sophistication since the early nineteenth century.

After Verdi, the sentimental «realistic» melodrama of verismo opera appeared in Italy. This was a style introduced by Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci that came virtually to dominate the world’s opera stages with such popular works as Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly. Later Italian composers, such as Berio and Nono, have experimented with modernism.^[6]

French opera

In rivalry with imported Italian opera productions, a separate French tradition was founded by the Italian Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of King Louis XIV. Despite his foreign origin, Lully established an Académie Royale de Musique (Academy of Music) and monopolized French opera from 1672. Starting with Cadmus et Hermione, Lully and his librettist Philippe Quinault created tragédie en musique, a form in which dance music and choral writing were particularly prominent. Lully’s operas also show a concern for expressive recitative which matched the contours of the French language. In the eighteenth century, Lully’s most important successor was Rameau, who composed five tragédies en musique as well as numerous works in other genres such as opera-ballet, all notable for their rich orchestration and harmonic daring. After Rameau’s death, the German Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for the Parisian stage in the 1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with greater focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the eighteenth century another genre was gaining popularity in France: opéra comique. This was the equivalent of the German singspiel, where arias alternated with spoken dialogue. Notable examples in this style were produced by Monsigny, Philidor and, above all, Grétry. During the French Revolutionary period, composers such as Méhul and Cherubini, who were followers of Gluck, brought a new seriousness to the genre, which had never been wholly «comic» in any case.

By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for Italian bel canto, especially after the arrival of Rossini in Paris. Rossini’s Guillaume Tell helped found the new genre of Grand opera, a form whose most famous exponent was another foreigner, Giacomo Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer’s works, such as Les Huguenots emphasised virtuoso singing and extraordinary stage effects. Lighter opéra comique also enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boïeldieu, Auber, Hérold and Adolphe Adam. In this climate, the operas of the French-born composer Hector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing. Berlioz’s epic masterpiece Les Troyens, the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a full performance for almost a hundred years.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jacques Offenbach created operetta with witty and cynical works such as Orphée aux enfers; Charles Gounod scored a massive success with the opera Faust; and Bizet composed the opera Carmen, which, once audiences learned to accept its blend of Romanticism and realism, became the most popular of all opéra comiques. Massenet, Saint-Saëns and Delibes all composed works which are still part of the standard repertory. At the same time, the influence of Richard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition. Many French critics angrily rejected Wagner’s music dramas while many French composers closely imitated them with variable success. Perhaps the most interesting response came from Claude Debussy. As in Wagner’s works, the orchestra plays a leading role in Debussy’s unique opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and there are no real arias, only recitative. But the drama is understated, enigmatic and completely unWagnerian.

Other notable twentieth-century names include Ravel, Dukas, Roussel and Milhaud. Francis Poulenc is one of the very few post-war composers of any nationality whose operas (which include Dialogues of the Carmelites (Dialogues des carmélites)) have gained a foothold in the international repertory. Olivier Messiaen’s lengthy sacred drama Saint François d’Assise (1983) has also attracted widespread attention.^[7]

German-language opera

The first German opera was Dafne, composed by Heinrich Schütz in 1627 (the music has not survived). Italian opera held a great sway over German-speaking countries until the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, native forms developed too. In 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the first Singspiel, a popular form of German-language opera in which singing alternates with spoken dialogue. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Theater am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg presented German operas by Keiser, Telemann and Handel. Yet many of the major German composers of the time, including Handel himself, as well as Graun, Hasse and later Gluck, chose to write most of their operas in foreign languages, especially Italian.

Mozart’s Singspiele, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) and Die Zauberflöte (1791) were an important breakthrough in achieving international recognition for German opera. The tradition was developed in the 19th century by Beethoven with his Fidelio, inspired by the climate of the French Revolution. Carl Maria von Weber established German Romantic opera in opposition to the dominance of Italian bel canto. His Der Freischütz (1821) shows his genius for creating supernatural atmosphere. Other opera composers of the time include Marschner, Schubert, Schumann and Lortzing, but the most important figure was undoubtedly Richard Wagner.

Wagner was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history. Starting under the influence of Weber and Meyerbeer, he gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a «complete work of art»), a fusion of music, poetry and painting. In his mature music dramas,Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, he abolished the distinction between aria and recitative in favour of a seamless flow of «endless melody.» He greatly increased the role and power of the orchestra, creating scores with a complex web of ‘leitmotivs’, recurring themes often associated with the characters and concepts of the drama; and he was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such as tonality, in his quest for greater expressivity. Wagner also brought a new philosophical dimension to opera in his works, which were usually based on stories from Germanic paganism or Arthurian legend. Finally, Wagner built his own opera house at Bayreuth, exclusively dedicated to performing his own works in the style he wanted.

Opera would never be the same after Wagner and for many composers his legacy proved a heavy burden. On the other hand, Richard Strauss accepted Wagnerian ideas but took them in wholly new directions. He first won fame with the scandalous opera Salome and the dark tragic opera Elektra, in which tonality was pushed to the limits. Then Strauss changed tack in his greatest success, Der Rosenkavalier, where Mozart and Viennese waltzes became as important an influence as Wagner. Strauss continued to produce a highly varied body of operatic works, often with libretti by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, right up until the opera Capriccio in 1942. Other composers who made individual contributions to German opera in the early twentieth century include Zemlinsky, Hindemith, Kurt Weill and the Italian-born Ferruccio Busoni. The operatic innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and his successors are discussed in the section on modernism.^[8]

English-language opera

England’s first notable composer working in operatic formats was John Blow, the composer of the opera Venus and Adonis, often thought of as the first true English-language opera. Blow’s immediate successor was the far more well-known Henry Purcell. Despite the success of his masterwork Dido and Aeneas, in which the action is furthered by the use of Italian-style recitative, much of Purcell’s best work was not involved in the composing of typical opera but instead he usually worked within the constraints of the semi-opera format, where isolated scenes and masques are contained within the structure of a spoken play. The main characters of the play tend not to be involved in the musical scenes, which means that Purcell was rarely able to develop his characters through song. Despite these hindrances, his aim (and that of his collaborator John Dryden) was to establish serious opera in England, but these hopes ended with Purcell’s early death at the age of 36.

Following Purcell, for many years Great Britain was essentially an outpost of Italianate opera. Handel’s opera serias dominated the London operatic stages for decades, and even home-grown composers such as Thomas Arne wrote using Italian models. This situation continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Michael Balfe, except for ballad operas, such as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which spoofed operatic conventions, and late Victorian era light operas, notably the Savoy Operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. French operetta was also frequently heard in London through the 1870s.

However, in the twentieth century, English opera began to assert more independence with works of Ralph Vaughn Williams and in particular Benjamin Britten, who in a series of fine works that remain in standard repertory today revealed an excellent flair for the dramatic and superb musicality. Today composers such as Thomas Adès continue to export English opera abroad.^[9]

Also in the twentieth century, American composers like Gershwin, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Carlisle Floyd began to contribute English-language operas infused with touches of popular musical styles. They were followed by modernists like Philip Glass, Mark Adamo, John Coolidge Adams, and Jake Heggie.

Russian opera

Opera was brought to Russia in the 1730s by the Italian operatic troupes and soon it became an important part of entertainment for the Russian Imperial Court and aristocracy. Many foreign composers such as Baldassare Galuppi, Giovanni Paisiello, Giuseppe Sarti, and Domenico Cimarosa (as well as various others) were invited to Russia to compose new operas, mostly in the Italian language. Simultaneously some domestic musicians like Maksym Berezovsky and Dmytro Bortniansky were sent abroad to learn to write operas. The first opera written in the Russian language was Tsefal i Prokris by the Italian composer Francesco Araja (1755). The development of Russian-language opera was supported by the Russian composers Vasily Pashkevich, Yevstigney Fomin and Alexey Verstovsky.

However, the real birth of Russian opera came with Mikhail Glinka and his two great operas A Life for the Tsar, (1836) and Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842). After him in the nineteenth century in Russia there were written such operatic masterpieces as Rusalka and The Stone Guest by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, the opera Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky, Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin, the opera Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and The Snow Maiden and Sadko by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. These developments mirrored the growth of Russian nationalism across the artistic spectrum, as part of the more general ‘Slavophilism’ movement.

In the twentieth century, the traditions of Russian opera were developed by many composers including Sergei Rachmaninov in his works The Miserly Knight and the opera Francesca da Rimini, Igor Stravinsky in Le rossignol, Mavra, the opera Oedipus rex, and The Rake’s Progress, Sergei Prokofiev in The Gambler, The Love for Three Oranges, The Fiery Angel (Prokofiev), Betrothal in a Monastery, and War and Peace; as well as Dmitri Shostakovich in the operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Edison Denisov in the opera L’écume des jours, and Alfred Schnittke in Life With an Idiot, and the opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten.^[10]

Other national operas

Spain also produced its own distinctive form of opera, known as zarzuela, which had two separate flowerings: one in the seventeenth century, and another beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. During the eighteenth century, Italian opera was immensely popular in Spain, supplanting the native form.

Czech composers also developed a thriving national opera movement of their own in the nineteenth century, starting with Bedřich Smetana who wrote eight operas including the internationally popular The Bartered Bride. Antonín Dvořák, most famous for the opera Rusalka, wrote 13 operas; and Leoš Janáček gained international recognition in the twentieth century for his innovative works including Jenůfa, The Cunning Little Vixen, and Káťa Kabanová.

The key figure of Hungarian national opera in the nineteenth century was Ferenc Erkel, whose works mostly dealt with historical themes. Among his most often performed operas are Hunyadi László and Bánk bán. The most famous modern Hungarian opera is Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. Erkel’s Polish equivalent was Stanislaw Moniuszko, most celebrated for the opera Straszny Dwór.^[11]

Contemporary, recent, and Modernist trends

Modernism

Perhaps the most obvious stylistic manifestation of modernism in opera is the development of atonality. The move away from traditional tonality in opera had begun with Wagner, and in particular the ‘Tristan chord’. Composers such as Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Giacomo Puccini, Paul Hindemith and Hans Pfitzner pushed Wagnerian harmony farther with a more extreme use of chromaticism and greater use of dissonance.

Operatic Modernism truly began in the operas of two Viennese composers, Arnold Schoenberg and his acolyte Alban Berg, both composers and advocates of atonality and its later development (as worked out by Schoenberg), dodecaphony. Schoenberg’s early musico-dramatic works, Erwartung (1909, premiered in 1924) and Die Gluckliche Hand display heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance in general. Schoenberg also occasionally used Sprechstimme, which he described as: «The voice rising and falling relative to the indicated intervals, and everything being bound together with the time and rhythm of the music except where a pause is indicated.»

The two operas of Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg, Wozzeck and the opera Lulu (left incomplete at his death) share many of the same characteristics as described above, though Berg combined his highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique with melodic passages of a more traditionally tonal nature (quite Mahlerian in character) which perhaps partially explains why his operas have remained in standard repertory, despite their controversial music and plots. Schoenberg’s theories have influenced (either directly or indirectly) significant numbers of opera composers ever since, even if they themselves did not compose using his techniques. Composers thus influenced include the Englishman Benjamin Britten, the German Hans Werner Henze, and the Russian Dmitri Shostakovich. (Philip Glass also makes use of atonality, though his style is generally described as minimalism, usually thought of as another twentieth century development.)

However, operatic modernism’s use of dodecaphony sparked a backlash among several leading composers. Prominent among the vanguard of these was the Russian Igor Stravinsky. After composing obviously Modernist music for the Diaghilev-produced ballets Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, in the 1920s Stravinsky turned to Neoclassicism, culminating in his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex.^[12] When he did compose a full-length opera that was without doubt an opera (after his Rimsky-Korsakov-inspired works The Nightingale (1914), and Mavra (1922)), in the The Rake’s Progress he continued to ignore serialist techniques and wrote an eighteenth century-style «number» opera, using diatonicism. His resistance to serialism proved to be an inspiration for many other composers.^[13]

Other trends

A common trend throughout the twentieth century, in both opera and general orchestral repertoire, is the downsizing of orchestral forces. As patronage of the arts decreases, new works are commissioned and performed with smaller budgets, very often resulting in chamber-sized works, and one act operas. Many of Benjamin Britten’s operas are scored for as few as 13 instrumentalists; Mark Adamo’s two-act realization of the opera Little Women is scored for 18 instrumentalists.

Another feature of twentieth century opera is the emergence of contemporary historical operas. The Death of Klinghoffer and the opera Nixon in China by John Adams, and the opera Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie exemplify the dramatization on stage of events in recent living memory, where characters portrayed in the opera were alive at the time of the premiere performance. Earlier models of opera generally stuck to more distant history, re-telling contemporary fictional stories (reworkings of popular plays), or mythical/legendary stories.^[14]

The Metropolitan Opera reports that the average age of its patrons is now 60. Many opera companies, have experienced a similar trend, and opera company websites are replete with attempts to attract a younger audience. This trend is part of the larger trend of greying audiences for European classical music since the last decades of the twentieth century.^[15]

From musicals back towards opera

Also by the late 1930s, some theatrical musicals began to be written with a more operatic structure. These works include complex polyphonic ensembles and reflect musical developments of their times. Porgy and Bess, influenced by jazz styles, and the operetta Candide, with its sweeping, lyrical passages and farcical parodies of opera, both opened on Broadway but became accepted as part of the opera repertory. Show Boat, West Side Story, Brigadoon, the musicals Sweeney Todd, Evita and others tell dramatic stories through complex music and are now sometimes seen in opera houses. Some musicals, beginning with the rock opera Tommy (1969) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), are through-composed, written with recitative instead of dialogue, telling their emotional stories predominantly through the music, and are styled rock operas.

Operatic voices

Singers and the roles they play are initially classified according to their vocal ranges. Male singers are classified by vocal range as bass, bass-baritone, baritone, tenor and countertenor. Female singers are classified by vocal range as contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano.^[16] Additionally, singers’ voices are loosely identified by characteristics other than range, such as timbre or color, vocal quality, agility, power, and tessitura. Thus a soprano may be termed a lyric soprano, coloratura, soubrette, spinto, or dramatic soprano; these terms the roles most suitable to the singer’s vocal characteristics. The German Fach system is an especially organized system, although not fully describing a singing voice, associate the singer’s voice with of vocal classification. A particular singer’s voice may change drastically over his or her lifetime, rarely reaching vocal maturity until the third decade, and sometimes not until middle age.

Brief Overview of Histories

The soprano voice has typically been used throughout operatic history as the voice of choice for the female protagonist of the opera in question. The current emphasis on a wide vocal range was primarily an invention of the Classical period. Before that, the vocal virtuosity, not range, was the priority, with soprano parts rarely extending above a high A (Handel, for example, only wrote one role extending to a high C), though the castrato Farinelli was alleged to possess a top F. The contralto register enjoys only a limited operatic repertoire; hence the saying that contraltos only sing «Witches, bitches, and britches (pants roles),» and in recent years many of the trouser roles from the Baroque era have been assigned to countertenors.

The tenor voice, from the Classical era onwards, has traditionally been assigned the role of male protagonist. Many of the most challenging tenor roles in the repertory were written during the bel canto era, such as Donizetti’s sequence of 9 Cs above middle C during La fille du régiment. With Wagner came an emphasis on vocal weight for his protagonist roles, the vocal category of which is described by the term heldentenor. Bass roles have a long history in opera, having been used in opera seria for comic relief (and as a contrast to the preponderance of high voices in this genre). The bass repertoire is wide and varied, stretching from the buffo comedy of Leporello in Don Giovanni to the nobility of Wotan in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In between the bass and the tenor is the baritone.

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Berger, William, The NPR curious listener’s guide to opera. NY: Grand Central Press: Perigee, 2002. ISBN 0-399-52743-5
• Hamilton, David, and Aliki Andris-Michalaros. The Metropolitan Opera encyclopedia: a comprehensive guide to the world of opera. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987. ISBN 0-671-61732-X
• Weiss, Piero. Opera: a history in documents. NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-195-11637-2

External links

All links retrieved November 17, 2022.

• OperaGlass, a resource at Stanford University