Word opera come from

The word “opera” is actually a shortened word for opera in musica . In 1573, a group of musicians and intellectuals came together to discuss various subjects, especially the desire to revive Greek drama. This group of individuals is known as the Florentine Camerata; they wanted lines to be sung instead of simply being spoken.

Are there speaking parts in an opera?

In a musical, the singing is interspersed with passages of dialogue, while in an opera, the singing never stops (very broadly speaking). Meanwhile although some operas include spoken passages or speech-like sections called ‘recitatives’, they are mostly sung without any spoken dialogue.

What four elements must be in an opera?

Opera is a dramatic story told through song. It is considered by many to be the most complete art form, combining all of the elements of art, words, music, drama and dance.

Which is the most important part of an opera?

Parts of an Opera: The Recitative . Recitative refers to the parts of an opera in which a performer imitates the rhythm of the spoken word. Recitative passages are usually sung on a repeated note or just a few notes, and there is no melody. Furthermore, the singer doesn’t repeat any words or sections of a recitative as he would in a strophic aria.

What are the recitative parts of an opera?

Recitative refers to the parts of an opera in which a performer imitates the rhythm of the spoken word. Recitative passages are usually sung on a repeated note or just a few notes, and there is no melody.

How are opera singers classified by their voice?

Operatic voices can be classified by a variety of means. At base we define singers by the vocal range of their voice (basically what notes they can sing), but opera has developed a range of conventions for grouping singers with particular vocal styles as well.

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The first opera can be traced back to Italy at the start of the 17th century.

When was opera first invented?

In Florence, a small group of artists, statesmen, writers and musicians known as the Florentine Camerata decided to recreate the storytelling of Greek drama through music. Enter Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), who composed Dafne (1597), which many consider to be the first opera.

When and how did opera begin?

The origins of opera can be traced back to 16th Century Italy. The first recorded use of the term “opera” was in 1639 although the first opera composition was written in 1597. This first opera, entitled “Dafne”, was created with the hope of reviving classical Greek drama as part of the broader Renaissance movement.

When did opera arise?

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 …

Where is opera most popular?

Opera by country – the 10 countries around the globe with the…

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First of all, let’s concentrate on the meaning of the word “opera” in English.

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary opera means “a musical play in which most of the words are sung”.

A more specific definition is given by Merriam-Webster: “a drama set to music and made up of vocal pieces with orchestral accompaniment and orchestral overtures”.

And what does opera mean in Italian?

In Italian the word opera means “work”, both in the sense of the labor done and the result produced. Its plural is opere.

Have a look at the following Italian expressions with their translations:

• l’opera dell’uomo: the work of man
• opere d’arte: artworks
• opere musicali: music works
• le opere di Dante Alighieri: Dante Alighieri’s works

Let’s now look at the other meaning of the word opera in Italian.

What other meaning does the word opera have in Italian?

Opera in Italian also means what opera means in English: a musical play in which most of the words are sung.

In fact, the word opera is a borrowing from Italian.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Italian word was first used in the sense of “composition in which poetry, dance, and music are combined” in 1639.

The first recorded English usage in this sense dates to 1648.

This makes sense since the first opera was written and composed in 1597 by the Italian composer Jacopo Peri.

Languages tend to borrow words from other languages when they don’t have an existing word for a specific concept.

Since opera originated in Italy, the concept around the word opera is very Italian. This concept was then spread to other parts of the world and other languages.

This is why, even nowadays, English speakers still use an Italian word to refer to a musical play.

Where does the word opera come from?

The Italian word derives from the Latin word opera, which is the plural of the noun opus.

Opus meant “work” in Latin. So, in theory, opera means “works”.

However, the word opus didn’t just have one meaning.

Let’s look at some of its meanings:

• work
• profession
• agricultural work
• construction
• hard work
• literary work
• effort
• work’s product
• artwork
• literary genre
• Lord’s work
• homework
• intercourse (in poetry)

As you can see, the words opus and opera had different, interrelated meanings.

Other words related to opera that come from Italian

Interestingly, most of the technical vocabulary of classical music is borrowed from Italian and that of ballet from French.

Let’s have a look at some other words related to opera, arts, and music in general that come from Italian.

• A cappella: singing without music
• Allegro: in brisk time
• Aria: a long, accompanied song for one voice
• Bravo: cry of approval
• Concerto: music for a single instrument accompanied by an orchestra
• Crescendo: a gradual increase in loudness
• Libretto: the text of an opera
• Piano: musical instrument
• Quartet: four voices or instruments (from quartetto)
• Sonata: composition for a single instrument
• Sonnet: a fourteen-line poem with a fixed rhyme scheme (from sonetto)
• Soprano: the highest female voice
• Staccato: play in an abrupt manner
• Tempo: time
• Trio: three voices or instruments
• Viola: a stringed instrument
• Violin: a stringed instrument (from violino)

As you can see, English borrowed many words from Italian.

This is because Italian is a musical and beautiful language! ?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The art form known as opera originated in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though it drew upon older traditions of medieval and Renaissance courtly entertainment. The word opera, meaning «work» in Italian, was first used in the modern musical and theatrical sense in 1639 and soon spread to the other European languages. The earliest operas were modest productions compared to other Renaissance forms of sung drama, but they soon became more lavish and took on the spectacular stagings of the earlier genre known as intermedio.

Dafne by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today,^[1] although with only five instrumental parts it was much more like a chamber opera than either the preceding intermedi or the operas of Claudio Monteverdi a few years later. It was written around 1597, largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the «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. The libretto was by Ottavio Rinuccini, who had written some of the 1587 Medici intermedi, in which Peri had also been involved; Rinuccini appears to have recycled some of the material, at least from the scene illustrated at right. Most of the music for «Dafne» is lost (the libretto was printed and survives), but one of Peri’s many later operas, Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day.

Traditions of staged sung music and drama go back to both secular and religious forms from the Middle Ages, and at the time opera first appears the Italian intermedio had courtly equivalents in various countries.

Etymology[edit]

The Italian word opera means «work», both in the sense of the labor done and the result produced. The Italian word in turn derives from the Latin opera. Opera is also the Latin plural of opus, with the same root, but the word opera was a singular Latin noun in its own right, and according to Lewis and Short, in Latin «opus is used mostly of the mechanical activity of work, as that of animals, slaves, and soldiers; opera supposes a free will and desire to serve». 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.^[2]

Italian origins of opera[edit]

Peri’s works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody. Monody is the solo singing/setting of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of the text it carries, which is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords rather than other polyphonic parts. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century, and it grew in part from the long-standing practise of performing polyphonic madrigals with one singer accompanied by an instrumental rendition of the other parts, as well as the rising popularity of more popular, more homophonic vocal genres such as the frottola and the villanella. In these latter two genres, the increasing tendency was toward a more homophonic texture, with the top part featuring an elaborate, active melody, and the lower ones (usually these were three-part compositions, as opposed to the four-or-more-part madrigal) a less active supporting structure. From this, it was only a small step to fully-fledged monody. All such works tended to set humanist poetry of a type that attempted to imitate Petrarch and his Trecento followers, another element of the period’s tendency toward a desire for restoration of principles it associated with a mixed-up notion of antiquity.

The solo madrigal, frottola, villanella and their kin featured prominently in the intermedio or intermezzo, theatrical spectacles with music that were funded in the last seventy years of the 16th century by the opulent and increasingly secular courts of Italy’s city-states. Such spectacles, were usually staged to commemorate significant state events: weddings, military victories, and the like, and alternated in performance with the acts of plays. Like the later opera, an intermedi featured the aforementioned solo singing, but also madrigals performed in their typical multi-voice texture, and dancing accompanied by the present instrumentalists. They were lavishly staged, and led the scenography of the second half of the 16th century. The intermedi tended not to tell a story as such, although they occasionally did, but nearly always focused on some particular element of human emotion or experience, expressed through mythological allegory.

The staging in 1600 of Peri’s opera Euridice as part of the celebrations for a Medici wedding, the occasions for the most spectacular and internationally famous intermedi of the previous century, was probably a crucial development for the new form, putting it in the mainstream of lavish courtly entertainment.

Another popular court entertainment at this time was the «madrigal comedy», later also called «madrigal opera» by musicologists familiar with the later genre. This consisted of a series of madrigals strung together to suggest a dramatic narrative, but not staged.^[3] There were also two staged musical «pastoral»s, Il Satiro and La Disperazione di Fileno, both produced in 1590 and written by Emilio de’ Cavalieri. Although these lost works seem only to have included arias, with no recitative, they were apparently what Peri was referring to, in his preface to the published edition of his Euridice, when he wrote: «Signor Emilio del Cavalieri, before any other of whom I know, enabled us to hear our kind of music upon the stage».^[4] Other pastoral plays had long included some musical numbers; one of the earliest, La fabula d’Orfeo (1480) by Poliziano had at least three solo songs and one chorus.^[5]

The French ballet de cour and the English masque[edit]

In addition to opera in Italy, developing concurrently in the late 16th-early 17th centuries were the particular national forms of the French ballet de cour, as part of Catherine de’ Medici’s court festivals, and the English masque, which were similar to the Italian intermedi in many respects, including an emphasis on spectacular staging. In both cases, the main difference apart from local musical style was a greater degree of audience participation in the form of staged or processional dances. At this time, of course, the audience consisted primarily of invited nobles and courtiers, although the 1589 Medici intermedi were repeated three times for a wider audience. The English masque also featured a culminating «revel,» in which the performers drifted into and cavorted with the audience. Opera was imported into both countries by the middle of the 17th century, where it fused with the local incipient genres. This led to the dominance of ballet in opera of the French tradition.

The First German Opera[edit]

Schütz’s Dafne (1627), for which the music is lost, though the libretto survives, was possibly the first German opera. Staden’s Seelewig (1644) is the first surviving German opera, though more a singspiel with spoken dialogue, which Dafne may also have been.

The First English Opera[edit]

In England, the masque tradition, a private court form, was too strongly associated with the court of Charles I to survive the outbreak of the English Civil War. Although, rather improbably, it was under the totalitarian and puritanical regime of Oliver Cromwell that the first Opera in English, The Siege of Rhodes, was produced in 1656, opera received no encouragement from that regime, and no subsidy from the post-Restoration government of Charles II, who preferred comedies and those who acted in them. This lack of financial backing, and the thriving English tradition of incidental music, made it difficult for Italian-style opera to take hold there. Instead, the English semi-opera developed, although these were not produced in very large numbers. Even after imported Italian operas began to be staged, English composers were extremely slow to attempt the genre.

Other ancestors of opera[edit]

Religious[edit]

In earlier times, music had been part of medieval mystery plays, with the composer of these best known to modern audiences being Hildegard of Bingen. Whether these are to be regarded as possible progenitors of opera is highly debatable. Major liturgical celebrations were often dramatic to a considerable degree, featuring elaborate processions, tableaux vivants and liturgical drama; the Missa Aurea is the best-known example. A new, 17th century form of religious drama, the oratorio did arise shortly after the advent of opera, though it owes at least as much to the (originally secular) non-dramatic recitative-aria form of the cantata.

Secular[edit]

The origins of opera clearly lie in the court, whereas the mystery plays were normally a bourgeois form, entrusted to the guilds. But various forms of medieval court festivities combined music and drama; in the Gothic period major royal banquets, such as the Burgundian Feast of the Pheasant of 1454, were accompanied by performances, often elaborately staged re-enactments of military actions, with courtiers taking the parts. Unlike the liturgical dramas, which have survived in large numbers, at least as far as the scripts are concerned, we have only cursory descriptions of earlier court dramatic spectacles. A Royal entry was typically accompanied by various short performances, including tableaux vivants and mascarades.

See also[edit]

• History of Opera

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

• Donald Jay Grout, Hermine Weigel Williams; A Short History of Opera, 2003 (first edn 1947),Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-11958-5; Excerpts online
• Roy Strong; Art and Power; Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650, 1984, The Boydell Press; ISBN 0-85115-200-7

In this article we take a short journey in the history of opera discovering the roots and the development of this art form.

Opera in Italy

The word opera comes from the Italian phrase opera in musica – work in music. The name represents all the efforts that build up an opera. The text (libretto, booklet), the music itself, the choral singers, the stage, costumes and movements.

Root of any musical drama is coming from the ancient Greek dramatists. Later, during the Middle Ages, Biblical stories were chanted and performed. The real modern opera however was born in North-Italy, in Florence. This city had everything ready and in place for giving birth to this new genre: strong theatrical tradition, a hint of humanism and a special view of music as a force of and link to the Universe.

Opera quickly became popular spreading to other important cities like Mantua, Venice, Naples or Rome. The role of Venice in the development of opera, similar to Florence, is outstanding! In 1637 the first opera house, the Teatro di San Cassiano, was opened and financed by the wealthy families of the city. This event removed the opera from the domains and patronage of the nobility making it available for the citizens. At the end of the century Venice had nine such commercial theaters!

All cities had something unique to add bringing many different operatic styles to life.

The German opera

Opera on German speaking areas appeared after Italian opera composers visited or resided in their cities. In fact, Italy’s influence was so strong that for a century even German composers used both Italian opera style and language. The first known German language opera was Dafne by Heinrich Schütz, in 1627. A dedicated German word was used for such performances, Singspiel.

Viennese audience was attracted to the Italian opera and later the opera buffa (comic opera) and local musicians followed suit. Haydn created music for 20 plays from short operas for marionettes, to opera buffas. The real heavy weight of the Vienna opera scene was Mozart.

His first theatrical music composition was done at age 10 and by 25 he completed his first opera Idomeneo, in Munich. Just a year later he rolled out The Abduction from the Seraglio and a few years later The marriage of Figaro, followed by Don Giovanni and the Magic flute.

After Mozart, the emptiness he left behind in German opera, was not filled for many decades. Beethoven composed only one opera, Fidelio, and despite its success, he was never satisfied with the play. The Fidelio’s libretto was written by Joseph Sonnleithner and was on in 1805, then in a revised form in 1806 and 1814.

The German opera, after the quiet years, revives in the 1820s with the appearance of Weber and the German romanticism. Nature, the supernatural, forces bigger than the main characters are always present in these plays with the longing for the pure and idealized love.

Music, the stage and story should work together under the Wagnerian approach. He perfected the storytelling of myths and legends. His most famous German mythical work, the Ring cycle lasts about 16 hours if played without interruption. This alone shows his dedication to the genre!

The last name to mention in the golden era of German opera is Richard Strauss, who was considered as the obvious heir to Wagner. His first success in opera came with Salome and Elektra, followed by 11 more compositions. Many consider his best work to be The woman without a shadow, from 1919.

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