Opera

Imagine you are in a darkened theater and on stage are the actors. Behind the actors you can see the scenery. Down in front of the stage, in what is called the pit, is an orchestra and a conductor. As the orchestra plays, the actors on stage do not speak their lines they sing them!

Opera is the combination of drama and music. Like drama, opera embraces the entire spectrum of theatrical elements: dialogue, acting, costumes, scenery and action, but it is the sum of all these elements, combined with music, which defines the art form called opera.

Operatic dramas are usually serious, but there are several comic operas and funny scenes in tragic operas. The music is usually complicated and difficult to sing well. Only the most skillful singers can handle it. The cast is usually made up of main characters (the soloists) and a chorus (a group of singers who act as a crowd of people involved in the action of the plot). Some operas have scenes in which dancing is performed by a small ballet group.

Operas usually begin with an overture - an introduction played by the orchestra alone. Once the curtain goes up, the soloists and chorus sing throughout most of the drama. Arias (songs sung by soloists) are the important points in an opera. In an aria, a character sings about his or her feelings and thoughts, or about what he or she is going to do.

Between arias, the soloists may sing back and fourth to each other in a kind of musical discussion called recitatives. Besides singing arias, soloists often join together to sing duets, trios, quartets, quintets, or sextets at various points in the opera. The chorus usually has several songs to sing, either alone or with the soloists. The music follows the action and mood of the plot.

Operas are usually performed in special buildings called opera houses. A choreographer creates the dances, and the chorus master rehearses the singers. The conductor leads the entire opera performance from his or her place in the pit. The soloists, chorus members and the dancers follow the directions of the conductor.

The ancient Greeks blended drama and music, but opera as we know it today developed in Italy in the late 1500s. At first, the music was used mainly for background. However, by the end of the century, the drama and the music were equally important.

The opera innovation inspired some of the biggest composers known today. In France, Jean-Baptiste Lully produced a model for courtly opera that influenced French opera through the mid-18th century. Jean-Philippe Rameau, George Frederic Handel, and Christoph Willibald Gluck were the most significant opera composers of the first two-thirds of the 18th century. However, their works were surpassed by the brilliant operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the early 19th century, Gioacchino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti dominated Italian opera. In the later 19th century the greatest works were those of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. Wagner, with his bold innovations, became the most influential operatic figure since Monteverdi. Richard Strauss and Giacomo Puccini wrote the most popular late 19th- and early 20th-century operas. Though the death of Puccini in 1924 is often cited as the end of grand opera, new and often experimental works--by composers such as Alban Berg, Benjamin Britten, Gian Carlo Menotti, John Adams, and Philip Glass--continued to be produced to critical acclaim. Opera entered the 21st century as a vibrant and global art form.

The first roots of modern opera first appeared in Italy in the 17th century from the Camerata (an academy of Florentine poets, musicians, and scholars). The Camerata, inspired by ancient Greek drama, sung dialogues and choruses which were accompanied by musical instruments. The Camerata developed the "stile recitative," in order to integrate drama, action, dialogue and narration. In this "sung speech," a singer delivered a recitative melody with an actor's dramatic and oratorical skills, achieving the goal of providing emotional impact to the text through the support of music. The primary focus of Italian opera at this time was the human voice. This instrument was capable of expressing human emotions and passions, aspirations, and desires. Since no actual Greek music was known, composers had considerable freedom in preconceiving it. Imitations of Greek pastoral poetry became the basis for early opera libretti. The first operas, Dafne by Jacopo Peri in 1598 and by Giulio Caccini about the same time, are now lost; the earliest surviving opera is Peri's Eurydice from the 1600's. They consisted of lightly accompanied vocal melody closely imitating inflected speech.

The musical style of Western Europe music between 1600 and 1750 was called the Baroque era. Typically, Baroque music was homophonic in texture, its melody concentrated on one voice or part that was accompanied.

Following the principles established by the Camerata, Claudio Monteverdi became the first great figure in opera. Monteverdi was a master at polyphony who wanted to experiment with monophony. He decided to set the drama to music and choose the myth of Orpheus. His opera, L'Orfeo premiered in Mantua in 1607. Monteverdi composed much of the dialogue of Orpheus as arioso, a mixture of recitative and metrical song. With this work, recitative began to be clearly distinguished from aria, an achievement that would prove decisive for opera's future success.

Monteverdi moved to Venice and made this city the center of opera in Italy. With the opening of the Teatro di San Cassiano in Venice in 1637, opera became accessible to the general public. Opera became the most popular art form of public entertainment because it was no longer exclusively for the nobility. Perhaps the focal point of opera at this time was arias. It was in arias that Italian castrato singers rose in popularity. The castrati were singers whose voices had been altered at puberty to preserve and develop their soprano and alto vocal range.

In the late 1600s, opera became extravagant, with magnificent scenery and huge casts of people. Arias were written into plots, and the dramas demanded more acting. Women were trained to sing the female roles. Some composers began writing full length comic operas. Before 1750, comic operas were short, funny little scenes performed for audiences as entertainment between the acts of serious opera. English 18th-century comic operas contained songs and musical interludes, usually consisting of existing popular tunes or opera melodies with new words, which are combined with spoken dialogue. The first ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera (1728), by John Gay and J.C. Pepusch, was a sharply satirical work that became wildly popular and led to numerous similar works.

At the height of the Baroque period, the most