Opera is an
art form in which
singers and
musicians perform a
dramatic work combining text (called a
libretto) and
musical score. 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".
(Lithograph)]]
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), 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."
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. Today composers such as Thomas Adès continue to export English opera abroad. 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, , and Love Counts.
Also in the 20th century, American composers like Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, 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, Mark Adamo, John Corigliano, Robert Moran, John Coolidge Adams, and Jake Heggie.
Russian opera
as
Ivan Susanin in
Glinka's
A Life for the Tsar]]
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 in 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.
Other national operas
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.
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. Antonín Dvořák, most famous for Rusalka, wrote 13 operas; and Leoš Janáček gained international recognition in the 20th century for his innovative works including Jenůfa, The Cunning Little Vixen, and Káťa Kabanová.
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.
The best-known composer of Polish national opera was Stanisław Moniuszko, most celebrated for the opera Straszny Dwór (in English The Haunted Manor). In the 20th century, other operas created by Polish composers included King Roger by Karol Szymanowski and Ubu Rex by Krzysztof Penderecki.
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
Richard Wagner, and in particular the
Tristan chord. Composers such as
Richard Strauss,
Claude Debussy,
Giacomo Puccini,
Paul Hindemith and
Hans Pfitzner pushed Wagnerian harmony further 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 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, 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 (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.)
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). 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). 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 (which ended at the death of Schoenberg) proved to be an inspiration for many other composers.
Other trends
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 20th century opera is the emergence of contemporary historical operas. The Death of Klinghoffer, Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic by John Adams, and Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie exemplify the dramatisation 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.
The Metropolitan Opera in the US reports that the average age of its audience 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 classical music since the last decades of the 20th century. In an effort to attract younger audiences, the Metropolitan Opera offers a student discount on ticket purchases. Major opera companies have been better able to weather the funding cutbacks, because they can afford to hire star singers which draw substantial audiences who want to see if their favourite singer will be able to hit their high "money notes" in the show.
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. Opera Carolina offer discounts and happy hour events to the 21–40 year old demographic. In addition to radio and television broadcasts of opera performances, which have had some success in gaining new audiences, broadcasts of live performances in HD to movie theatres have shown the potential to reach new audiences. Since 2006, the Met has broadcast live performances to several hundred movie screens all over the world.
From musicals back towards opera
Also 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.
Show Boat,
West Side Story,
Brigadoon,
,
Evita,
The Light in the Piazza, The Phantom of the Opera and others tell dramatic stories through complex music and are now sometimes seen in opera houses. Some musicals, beginning with
Tommy (1969) and
Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and continuing through
Les Misérables (1980),
Rent (1996) and
Spring Awakening (2006), use various operatic conventions, such as
through composition, recitative instead of dialogue,
leitmotifs and dramatic stories told predominantly through rock, pop or contemporary music.
Acoustic enhancement with speakers
A subtle type of sound electronic reinforcement called
acoustic enhancement is used in some concert halls where operas are performed. Acoustic enhancement systems help give a more even sound in the hall and prevent "dead spots" in the audience seating area by "...augment[ing] a hall's intrinsic acoustic characteristics." The systems use "...an array of microphones connected to a computer [which is] connected to an array of loudspeakers." However, as concertgoers have become aware of the use of these systems, debates have arisen, because some "...purists maintain that the natural acoustic sound of [Classical] voices [or] instruments in a given hall should not be altered."
Kai Harada's article "Opera's Dirty Little Secret" states that opera houses began using electronic acoustic enhancement systems in the 1990s "...to compensate for flaws in a venue's acoustical architecture." Despite the uproar that has arisen amongst operagoers, Harada points out that none of the major opera houses using acoustic enhancement systems "...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." Instead, most opera houses use the 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).
Operatic voices
First of all Operatic voices needed enough volume to compete with the overwhelming volume of the orchestra. In times without electronic devices nor microphones that could amplify them they needed special techniques to make sure the people in the end rows of the theatre could enjoy them as much as the front rows did. Therefore a singing technique was developed to make sure they could stand out in the bombast of the orchestra, without the musicians having to compromise in volume.
Vocal classifications
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 loosely classified by
vocal range as
bass,
bass-baritone,
baritone,
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. Of these, only 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 classified by
voice type – 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. 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.
Historical use of voice parts
:
The following is only intended as a brief overview. For the main articles, see soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, 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. 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 used until the mid-19th century.
Famous singers
, c. 1720]]
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 fist fight with one another during a performance of a Handel opera. The French disliked castrati, preferring their male heroes to be sung by a
haute-contre (a high tenor), of which
Joseph Legros was a leading example.
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 famous singers such as Maria Callas, Enrico Caruso, Kirsten Flagstad, Mario Del Monaco, Franco Corelli, Kathleen Ferrier, Montserrat Caballé, Joan Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson, Nellie Melba, Rosa Ponselle, Beniamino Gigli, Jussi Björling, Feodor Chaliapin, "The Three Tenors" (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras), and others.
Funding of opera
Outside the US, and especially in Europe, most opera houses receive public subsidies from taxpayers.
For example, in Milan, Italy, 60% of La Scala's annual budget of €115 million is from sales and private donations, with the remaining 40% coming from public funds.
In 2005, La Scala received 25% of Italy's total state subsidy of €464 million for the performing arts.
Cinema
Major opera houses and production companies have begun broadcasting their performances to local cinemas throughout the United States and in many other countries. The
Metropolitan Opera, first opened in 1883, began
high-definition television transmissions in 2006. Many of its performances are also shown live in
movie theaters around the world. In 2007, Met performances were shown in over 424 theaters in 350 U.S. cities.
La bohème went out to 671 screens worldwide. The Met remains the only company that transmits all of its performances live, although in many cases this is only via radio broadcast.
San Francisco Opera, founded in 1923, began prerecorded broadcasts in March 2008. As of June 2008, approximately 125 theaters in 117 U.S. cities carry the broadcast. Their distribution company, Bigger Picture, screens the operas with the same
HD digital cinema projectors used for major
Hollywood films. European opera houses and
festivals such as
La Scala in
Milan, the
Salzburg Festival,
La Fenice in
Venice and the
Maggio Musicale in
Florence have also broadcast their productions to 91 theaters in 90 U.S. cities since 2006. The emergence of the Internet is also seemingly affecting the way in which audiences consume opera. In a first for the genre, in 2009 British Opera house
Glyndebourne made available online a full digital video download of Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde, filmed two years previously.
See also
Outline of opera
Dance
Orchestral enhancement
Persian opera
List articles
Glossary of musical terminology
List of opera companies
List of important operas – an annotated, chronological, selected list of operas which are included for their historical significance, widespread popularity, or both.
List of major opera composers – an annotated compilation of the most frequently named composers on ten lists published by opera experts.
List of opera genres
List of opera directors
List of opera festivals
List of opera houses
List of operas by title – an alphabetical list by title of operas with Wikipedia articles.
The opera corpus – an extended list of more than 1900 works by more than 500 composers.
Voice type, the classification of singers by the tessitura, weight, and timbre of their voices.
Notes
References
Apel, Willi, ed. (1969). Harvard Dictionary of Music, Second Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. SBN 674375017.
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. Accessed 3 October 2009.
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.
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 and ISBN 1-56159-228-5
The Viking Opera Guide (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
Further reading
DiGaetani, John Louis: An Invitation to the Opera, Anchor Books, 1986/91. ISBN 0-385-26339-2.
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 9781884822797
Simon, Henry W.: A Treasury of Grand Opera, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1946.
External links
Operabase – Comprehensive opera performances database
StageAgent – synopses & character descriptions for most major operas
What's it about? - Opera plot summaries
Vocabulaire de l'Opéra
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
Category:Opera history
Category:Musical forms
Category:Italian loanwords
![Sichuan opera opera or Chuanju (Chinese: 川剧 pinyin: chuānjù) is a type of Chinese opera originating in China's Sichuan province around 1700.[1][2] Today's Sichuan opera is a relatively recent synthesis of 5 historic melodic styles.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110414062607im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/89/d6/11f7460abc79ba400e6fd798a517_grande.jpg "Sichuan opera opera or Chuanju (Chinese: 川剧 pinyin: chuānjù) is a type of Chinese opera originating in China's Sichuan province around 1700.[1][2] Today's Sichuan opera is a relatively recent synthesis of 5 historic melodic styles.")
![Sichuan opera opera or Chuanju (Chinese: 川剧 pinyin: chuānjù) is a type of Chinese opera originating in China's Sichuan province around 1700.[1][2] Today's Sichuan opera is a relatively recent synthesis of 5 historic melodic styles.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110414062607im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/89/d6/11f7460abc79ba400e6fd798a517_thumb.jpg "Sichuan opera opera or Chuanju (Chinese: 川剧 pinyin: chuānjù) is a type of Chinese opera originating in China's Sichuan province around 1700.[1][2] Today's Sichuan opera is a relatively recent synthesis of 5 historic melodic styles.")
