Opera

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This article is about the art form. For other uses, see Opera
(disambiguation).

Opera

The Palais Garnier of
the Paris Opéra, one
of the world's most famous opera
houses.

Ancestor arts

Drama

Originating culture

Italy

Originating era

late 1500s

Performing
arts

Major forms

Dance · Music · Opera · Theatre · Circus

Minor forms

Magic · Puppetry

Genres

Drama · Tragedy · Comedy · Tragicomedy · Romance · Satire · Epic · Lyric

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Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians
perform a dramatic
work combining text (called a libretto) and musical
score.[1]
Opera is part of the Western classical music
tradition.[2]
Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and
sometimes includes dance. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by
an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble.

Opera started in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri's lost Dafne, produced in Florence around 1597) and soon
spread through the rest of Europe: Schütz in Germany,
Lully in France, and
Purcell in England all
helped to establish their national traditions in the 17th century. However, in
the 18th century, Italian opera continued to dominate most of Europe, except
France, attracting foreign composers such as Handel. Opera seria was the most
prestigious form of Italian opera, until Gluck reacted
against its artificiality with his "reform" operas in the 1760s. Today the most
renowned figure of late 18th century opera is Mozart, who
began with opera seria but is most famous for his Italian comic operas, especially
The Marriage of
Figaro, Don
Giovanni, and Così fan tutte,
as well as The Magic
Flute, a landmark in the German tradition.

The first third of the 19th century saw the highpoint of the bel canto style, with Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini all creating
works that are still performed today. It also saw the advent of Grand Opera typified by the
works of Meyerbeer. The
mid-to-late 19th century was a "golden age" of opera, led and dominated by Wagner in Germany and Verdi in Italy. The
popularity of opera continued through the verismo era in Italy and
contemporary French
opera through to Puccini and 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 (Schoenberg and Berg), Neoclassicism (Stravinsky), and Minimalism (Philip Glass and John Adams). With
the rise of recording technology, singers such as Enrico Caruso became known
to audiences beyond the circle of opera fans. Operas were also performed on (and
written for) radio and television.

Contents

1 Operatic
terminology

2 History

2.1 Origins

2.2 Italian
opera

2.2.1 The Baroque
era

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

2.2.3 Bel canto, Verdi
and verismo

2.3 German-language
opera

2.4 French
opera

2.5 English-language
opera

2.6 Russian
opera

2.7 Other national
operas

2.8 Contemporary, recent,
and Modernist trends

2.8.1 Modernism

2.8.2 Other
trends

2.8.3 From musicals back
towards opera

2.9 Acoustic enhancement
with speakers

3 Operatic voices

3.1 Vocal
classifications

3.2 Historical use of voice
parts

3.3 Famous
singers

4 Funding of
opera

5 Cinema

6 See also

6.1 List
articles

7 Notes

8 References

9 Further
reading

10 External
links

[edit]
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, 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,[3]
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
usually a harpsichord and
a cello; or accompagnato (also known as strumentato) in which the
orchestra provided accompaniment. By the 19th 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 below.[4]

[edit]
History

[edit]
Origins

Main article: Origins of opera

Claudio
Monteverdi

The word opera means "work" in Italian (it is 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
"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 is unfortunately lost. A
later work by Peri, 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 L'Orfeo, composed for the
court of Mantua in 1607.[5]

[edit]
Italian opera

Main article: Italian opera

[edit]
The Baroque era

George Frideric
Handel, 1733

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 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 less cultured than 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, (as indeed, such plots had
always been) 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 '20s, 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 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. Indeed, Farinelli was the most famous singer of
the 18th century. 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.[6]

[edit]
Reform: Gluck, the attack on the Metastasian ideal, and
Mozart

Mozart
K. 527

Overture to Don Giovanni
(1787), one of Mozart's most well-known pieces. (6:49 minutes)

Illustration for the 1774 Paris edition of Orfeo ed
Euridice

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 (1754) 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 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 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.[7]

[edit]
Bel canto, Verdi and
verismo

Giuseppe Verdi, by Giovanni Boldini, 1886
(National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome)

La
donna è mobile

Enrico Caruso sings
"La donna è
mobile", from Giuseppe Verdi's
Rigoletto
(1908)

No
Pagliaccio non son

Aria from Ruggero
Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Performed
by Enrico Caruso

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.

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 Falstaff, which
reveal how far Italian opera had grown in sophistication since the early 19th
century.

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
virtually 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.[8]

[edit]
German-language
opera

Main article: German
opera

Illustration inspired by Wagner's music drama
Das Rheingold

Richard Wagner in 1871

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 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 17th century and early 18th century, 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 a supernatural atmosphere. Other opera
composers of the time include Marschner, Schubert, Schumann 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. 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 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 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, right up until Capriccio in 1942.
Other composers who made individual contributions to German opera in the early
20th 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.[9]

[edit]
French opera

Main article: French opera

A performance of Lully's opera Armide at the Palais-Royal in
1761

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 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. 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 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.

Carmen:
Chanson du toréador

Pasquale Amato's
1911 rendition of the Toréador's song from Georges Bizet's
Carmen
(1875).

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 Bizet composed 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 20th 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 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.[10]

[edit]
English-language
opera

Main article: Opera in English

Henry
Purcell

Stay,
Prince and hear

A scene from Purcell's Dido and
Æneas. The witches' messenger, in the form of Mercury himself,
attempts to convince Æneas to leave Carthage.

In England, opera's antecedent was the 17th century jig. This was an
afterpiece which 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".[11]
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).[11]
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.

Thomas
Arne

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".

The Mikado
(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),[11]
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."[12]

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.[13]
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.

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.

[edit]
Russian opera

Main article: Russian opera

Feodor Chaliapin 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.[14]

[edit]
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).[15]
In the 20th century, other operas created by Polish composers included King Roger by Karol Szymanowski and
Ubu Rex by Krzysztof
Penderecki.

[edit]
Contemporary, recent, and Modernist trends

[edit]
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.

Arnold Schoenberg in 1917.
Portrait by Egon
Schiele.

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".[cite
this quote]

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.

Stravinsky in 1921.

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).[16]
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).[17]
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.[18]

[edit]
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.[19]

The Metropolitan Opera in the US reports that the average age of its audience
is now 60.[citation
needed] 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.[20]
In an effort to attract younger audiences, the Metropolitan Opera offers a
student discount on ticket purchases.[21]
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.[22]
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.[23]

[edit]
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, Sweeney
Todd, 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.[dubious
– discuss]

[edit]
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."[24]

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."[25]
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).

[edit]
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.

[edit]
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.

[edit]
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.

[edit]
Famous singers

The castrato Senesino, 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.[26]

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.

[edit]
Funding of opera

Outside the US, and especially in Europe, most opera houses receive public
subsidies from taxpayers.[27]

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.[28]
In 2005, La Scala received 25% of Italy's total state subsidy of €464 million
for the performing arts.[29]

[edit]
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.[30]
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.[31]
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.[32][33]
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.[34]

[edit]
See also

Opera
portal

Outline of opera

Dance

Orchestral
enhancement

Persian
opera

[edit]
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.

[edit]
Notes

^ Some
definitions of opera: "dramatic performance or composition of which music is
an essential part, branch of art concerned with this" (Concise
Oxford English Dictionary); "any dramatic work that can be sung (or at
times declaimed or spoken) in a place for performance, set to original music
for singers (usually in costume) and instrumentalists" (Amanda Holden,
Viking Opera Guide); "musical work for the stage with singing
characters, originated in early years of 17th century" (Pears
Cyclopaedia, 1983 ed.).

^ Comparable art
forms from various other parts of the world, many of them ancient in origin,
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.

^ Apel, p. 718.

^ General
information in this section comes from the relevant articles in The Oxford
Companion to Music, by. P.Scholes (10th ed., 1968).

^ Oxford
Illustrated History of Opera, Chapter 1; articles on Peri and Monteverdi
in The Viking Opera Guide.

^ Oxford
Illustrated History of Opera, Chapters 1–3.

^ Man and
Music: the Classical Era, ed. Neal Zaslaw (Macmillan,
1989); entries on Gluck and Mozart in The Viking Opera Guide.

^ Oxford
Illustrated History of Opera, Chapters 5, 8 and 9. Viking Opera
Guide entry on Verdi.

^ General outline
for this section from The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, Chapters
1–3, 6, 8 and 9, and The Oxford Companion to Music; more specific
references from the individual composer entries in The Viking Opera
Guide.

^ General outline
for this section from The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, Chapters
1–4, 8 and 9; and The Oxford Companion to Music (10th ed., 1968); more
specific references from the individual composer entries in The Viking
Opera Guide.

^ a
b
c
From Webrarian.com's Ivanhoe site.

^ the Daily
Telegraph's review of Yeomen stated, "The accompaniments... are
delightful to hear, and especially does the treatment of the woodwind compel
admiring attention. Schubert himself could hardly have handled those
instruments more deftly. ...we have a genuine English opera, forerunner of
many others, let us hope, and possibly significant of an advance towards a
national lyric stage. (quoted at p. 312 in Allen, Reginald (1975). The
First Night Gilbert and Sullivan. London: Chappell & Co. Ltd.).
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.

^ Oxford
Illustrated History of Opera, Chapters 1, 3 and 9. The Viking Opera
Guide articles on Blow, Purcell and Britten.

^ Taruskin,
Richard: Russia in 'The New Grove Dictionary of Opera', ed. Stanley Sadie
(London, 1992); Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, Chapters 7–9.

^ See the
chapter on "Russian, Czech, Polish and Hungarian Opera to 1900" by John
Tyrrell in The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera (1994).

^ Chris Walton,
"Neo-classical opera" in Cooke, p. 108.

^ 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.

^ Oxford
Illustrated History of Opera, Chapter 8; The Viking Opera Guide
articles on Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky; Malcolm MacDonald
Schoenberg (Dent,1976); Francis Routh, Stravinsky (Dent,
1975).

^ However,
something similar happened in French opera during the Revolutionary era.
One example is Gossec's
Le triomphe de la République (1793), depicting the French victory at Valmy the previous
year. Such works were obviously intended as propaganda.

^ General
reference for this section: Oxford Illustrated History of Opera,
Chapter 9.

^ "Information about Metropolitan Opera Company student
discounts". Metoperafamily.org. http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/about/education/student.aspx. Retrieved 2010-11-09.

^ Opera Carolina discount information

^ "On Air & On Line: 2007–08 HD Season". The Metropolitan
Opera. 2007. http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/broadcast/hd_events_alternates.aspx. Retrieved 10 April 2008.

^ Kai Harada, "Why do
you need a Sound System?", harada-sound.com, 2005

^ Kai Harada, "Opera's Dirty Little Secret", Entertainment Design, 1
March 2001

^ The Oxford
Illustrated History of Opera (ed. Parker, 1994), Chapter 11

^ "Special report: Private money for the arts," The
Economist, 6 August 2001

^ Owen, Richard (26 May 2010). "Is it curtains for Italys opera houses". The Times
(London). http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article7136329.ece.

^ Willey, David (27 October 2005). "Italy facing opera funding crisis". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4381128.stm.

^ Metropolitan Opera high-definition live broadcast page

^ "The Bigger
Picture". Thebiggerpicture.us. http://www.thebiggerpicture.us/opera. Retrieved 2010-11-09.

^ Emerging Pictures

^ "Where to See
Opera at the Movies" sidebar p. W10 in June 21–22, 2008 The Wall Street
Journal.

^ "Tristan und Isolde - Download Tristan und Isolde".
Glyndebourne. 2007-08-06. http://www.glyndebourne.com/operas/tristan_und_isolde/download. Retrieved 2010-11-09.

[edit]
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

[edit]
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.

[edit]
External links

Find more about
Opera on Wikipedia's sister
projects:

Definitions
from Wiktionary

Images and
media from Commons

Learning
resources from Wikiversity

News stories
from Wikinews

Quotations
from Wikiquote

Source texts
from Wikisource

Textbooks
from Wikibooks

Operabase – Comprehensive opera performances database

StageAgent
– synopses & character descriptions for most major operas

What's it about? - Opera plot summaries

Vocabulaire de l'Opéra (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. http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/history_of_opera/index.html. Retrieved 2011-15-02.

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donna · Prompter · Recitative · Regietheater · Répétiteur · Ritornello · Sitzprobe · Spinto · Sprechgesang · Squillo · Stagione · Surtitles · Tessitura · Timbre · Travesti · Verismo · Vibrato

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pedagogy  · Vocal range
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