What is Opera?

If you think opera is just a stilted, stodgy art form reserved for the rich, you're wrong. If you think it's just spear-holding, helmet-headed fat ladies singing loudly, you're wrong again. If you think going to Tosca is just an excuse to dress up for a Saturday night at the opera house, you're in for a big surprise. Sit up. Sit back. Open your ears and your eyes, your whole self (we're asking a lot!) and you'll experience the most extravagant, enlightening, enriching mixed media art form known to man. 

Combining music, drama, dance, design, and the unamplified human voice, opera (the term literally means "work") explores our hearts and humanity, articulates our deepest, often unconscious desires, and opens the widest window to our soul.[To Top]

Mixed media began way before MTV. Words and music were combined in Ancient Greek dramas where Sophocles was set to simple string accompaniment and the backup chorus was enlisted for comment. Hundreds of years later in Renaissance Italy, a group of philosophers and musicians known as the Florentine Camerata revolted against the dense, polyphonic (many voiced) music of the Middle Ages. They revived the simple, single-line vocal style favored by the Greeks; and called this speech-like song recitative. In works like Orfeo and The Coronation of Poppea, Monteverdi, the first great opera composer, combined plot-forwarding recitatives with melodic, fluid songs called arias, choruses, orchestra, dances, and scenery in true mixed-media fashion. The elements of opera as we know it today were born! The early 18th Century witnessed the rise of Opera Seria, large-scale spectacle-filled operas based on "serious" mythological subjects. (The characters wore togas and carried swords!).Lully and Rameau wrote them in France; Scarlatti made them in Italy; Handel (of Messiah fame) was going broke writing opera serias in England until he discovered the box office security that came from oratorios. Arias ruled the art form and sopranos ruled the opera scene. They substituted arias at will and freely added cadenzas (vocal fireworks just before the end of the aria) to display their vocal virtuosity. The cult of the singer was born and the castrati (surgically insured adult male sopranos!) were the darlings of the audience. [To Top]
Tastes changed around the mid-1700s. The new crop of composers led by Gluck rebelled against the excesses of opera seria and the whims of the singer. Their new works featured ordinary people instead of legendary heroes. Their arias, orchestration, and dances developed out of the dramatic situation. No one element of their "mixed media" works would serve solely as a star turn for the featured diva of the evening. They put music and text back into balance, and added a new element: humor. The Italians called this reformed operaopera buffa . Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona (The Serving Maid Who Became Mistress) was the model. The French termed the popular style opéra comique. In England, Dr. John Pepusch and John Gay created the first ballad opera with The Beggar's Opera . It featured low-life criminals, earthy humor, romance, and introduced opera's first anti-hero. Ballad opera became Singspiel in Germany. And Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart became its supreme creator. He married words and music unlike any composer before him and became our first mixed media master. Characters were realized through stunning melodies and orchestral colors. Every one of Mozart's sublime musical utterances, nuances and flourishes evolved from and heightened the drama on stage. He collaborated often with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte and took ensemble writing to polyphonic heights in the sextet in The Marriage of Figaro.[To Top]
Musical mixed media geniuses were numerous in the 19th Century. Italy gave us Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti who, writing in the bel canto style of beautiful, florid vocalism, gave us some of the most stunning coloratura passages in the repertoire. Verdi reigns in verismo, a new kind of realism in operas about extraordinary events in the lives of ordinary people. Verdi's melodies are at once muscular and tender; powerful and poignant. His plots were violent and explored themes of loyalty and patriotism. In Aida, Verdi uses short musical themes to represent characters. The other 19th-century musical giant, Wagner, (Verdi and Wagner were both born in 1813!) termed these musical themes leitmotifsand used them as thematic threads thoughout his music dramas. Wagner took the recitative of the Florentine Camerata (remember those Renaissance guys?) to symphonic proportions. His melodic, stretched-out, unresolved, aching recitatives replaced the arias of past. Wagner revealed the inarticulateyearnings of his characters' unconscious in the music of the orchestra. The orchestra was the star in Wagner's mixed media music dramas, and rightly so, situated as it is in the stage underworld of the drama's unconscious.[To Top]
While Verdi was writing his juicy Italian verismo operas and Wagner was in Germany weaving sublime supernatural musical cycles, other 19th-century composers in other countries were contibuting to Opera's Top 40. Bizet's violent and earthy Carmen (always at the top of the charts!) and Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande make the French proud. Combining powerful musical traditions with a love affair with European culture, from Russia came magnificent works by Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, who incorporated actual folktunes into their works. 

Strauss was Wagner's 20th-century successor; Puccini was Verdi's. The former reached his pristine artistic bloom in Der Rosenkavalier. Puccini stretched the simple melodic line of the Camerata into the most beautifully arching and beloved arias. Like the tunes from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and Bernstein's West Side Story, they are embedded in our musical heritage and our hearts. Opera's instrument is the human voice. Nothing can reach the heart more directly than that![To Top]
--- LISA VAHRADIAN 

 This text is taken from BMG Classics.
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 Musicals

An American theatrical and cinematic genre that emphasizes song and dance. The story-line is flavored and informed by the content of the music and lyrics. Arguably, films are simply a vehicle for promoting various singing artists or dancing stars but theatrical productions are more contingent upon the company and nexus. Plots centered on the dreams of individuals who were hoping to escape the depression often depicting undiscovered talent being found. Musicals can easily be described as Broadway and film musical as Broadway on film. Operetta like productions were often brought to the screen before the second world war. In post-war years, the musical was elaborate, lavish and scintillatingdominated, by MGM. Pre-War examples of musicals included "The Jazz Singer" (the first "talkie"), "The Wizard of Oz," "Showboat," and "Paramount on Parade." Post war examples included "Singing in the Rain," "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," and "An American in Paris." More recent film musicals have given rise to "West Side Story," "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music," "Mary Poppins," and the second re-make of "All That Jazz." Interestingly the musical "All That Jazz" has been filmed three times starring Al Jolson (1927), Danny Thomas, (1951) and Neil Diamond (1979). 
This text is taken from All Music Guide.
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