Opera

• 1. Introduction

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  Opera began with a piece that no longer exists. Around 1597, an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who called themselves the Camerata de' Bardi inspired a work called Dafne, composed by Jacopo Peri. They believed the chorus parts of ancient Greek dramas had originally been sung, and they set out to restore that lost world of antiquity. Dafne tried to revive classical Greek drama, and then it vanished. The score is lost. Yet that experiment in a Florentine drawing room produced a form of Western theatre where music is a fundamental component and the dramatic roles are taken by singers. The Italian word opera simply means work, both the labor done and the result produced. So how did a single attempt to imitate the Greeks grow into something that demanded castrated singers, harpsichords, six harps in a single score, and opera houses scattered across Europe? Why did one composer build his own theatre just to stage his own works? And how does a four-hundred-year-old art form survive when the average listener in the room is now sixty?

• 2. The Grammar Of Singing

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  Recitative is the engine of an opera's plot. It is sung in a style designed to imitate and emphasize the inflections of speech, carrying the story forward between the moments of high feeling. The aria does the opposite work. An aria, meaning an air or formal song, is where characters express their emotions in a more structured melodic style. Traditional opera, often called number opera, is built from these two modes, with vocal duets, trios, and choruses added to comment on the action.

  Secco recitative, meaning dry, was sung with a free rhythm dictated by the accent of the words. It was accompanied only by basso continuo, usually a harpsichord and a cello. Accompagnato, also called strumentato, handed that accompaniment to the full orchestra instead. Over the 18th century, arias were increasingly accompanied by the orchestra, and by the 19th century accompagnato had gained the upper hand. Some forms abandon recitative altogether. In Singspiel, opéra comique, operetta, and semi-opera, spoken dialogue replaces it. A melodic passage occurring in the midst of recitative earned its own name, arioso.

  Richard Wagner broke this whole grammar apart. In his quest for what he termed endless melody, he abolished almost all distinction between aria and recitative. Subsequent composers tended to follow his example, though not all. Igor Stravinsky bucked the trend with his The Rake's Progress, a full diatonic number opera written in 1951 in an 18th-century style.

• 3. The Castrato And The Star

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  The role of the operatic hero was once written for a voice produced by mutilation. The high-pitched male castrato voice came from castration of the singer before puberty, which prevented a boy's larynx from being transformed. During the golden age of opera seria, this was the voice of the protagonist, and the singer became the star. Opera seria was elevated in tone and highly stylized, usually consisting of secco recitative interspersed with long da capo arias that afforded great opportunity for virtuosic singing.

  Farinelli was one of the most famous singers of the 18th century, and he was alleged to possess a top D, with a lower range extending to tenor C. Castrati such as Farinelli and Senesino became international stars as Italian opera was performed throughout Europe. They ruled the stage in every country except France, where audiences disliked castrati. The French preferred their male heroes sung by an haute-contre, a high tenor, of which Joseph Legros, who lived from 1739 to 1793, was a leading example.

  Female stars rose alongside them, sometimes violently. The career of the first major prima donna, Anna Renzi, dates to the mid-17th century. In the 18th century, the sopranos Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni started a fistfight with one another during a performance of a Handel opera. Commercial opera, born in the mid-17th century, was what finally let professional performers make a living from the form.

• 4. A Map Of National Traditions

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  Venice in 1637 invented the paying audience. There the idea of a season of publicly attended operas supported by ticket sales emerged, often timed to the carnival. Claudio Monteverdi had moved to the city from Mantua and composed his last operas there, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea, in the 1640s. His most important follower, Francesco Cavalli, helped spread opera throughout Italy.

  Jean-Baptiste Lully, an Italian-born composer, founded the French tradition at the court of King Louis XIV and monopolized French opera from 1672. With his librettist Quinault he created tragédie en musique, where dance music and choral writing were prominent. Lully is known to have conducted with a long staff. His successor Jean-Philippe Rameau composed five tragédies en musique notable for harmonic daring.

  German opera took a stranger path. The first German opera was a different Dafne, composed by Heinrich Schütz in 1627, and its score has also not survived. In 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the first Singspiel, Seelewig. German opera was generally composed for the masses and tended toward simple folk-like melodies, while Italian opera served the aristocratic class.

  England's opera grew from the 17th-century jig, a libellous afterpiece at the end of a play. Around 1683, John Blow composed Venus and Adonis, often thought of as the first true English-language opera. His successor Henry Purcell wrote the masterwork Dido and Aeneas in 1689, but mostly worked within the semi-opera format before his death at the age of 36.

  Russia received opera in the 1730s from Italian troupes. The first opera written in Russian was Tsefal i Prokris by the Italian composer Francesco Araja in 1755. The real birth of Russian opera came with Mikhail Glinka and his A Life for the Tsar in 1836 and Ruslan and Lyudmila in 1842. In Bohemia, Bedřich Smetana wrote eight operas including The Bartered Bride, which reached Vienna in 1892 and London in 1895.

• 5. Verdi And The Italian Climb

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  Nabucco changed Italian opera. With this biblical opera, Giuseppe Verdi began a career that turned the form from a display of vocal fireworks into dramatic story-telling. His operas resonated with the growing spirit of Italian nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era, and he became an icon of the patriotic movement for a unified Italy.

  Rigoletto, from the early 1850s, proved the most daring of his three most popular operas, alongside Il trovatore and La traviata. In Rigoletto, Verdi blurred the distinction between aria and recitative as it never before was, making the opera an unending string of duets. La traviata told the story of a courtesan and included elements of verismo, or realistic opera, focusing on the tragedies of ordinary life rather than great kings.

  Falstaff set the standard for the twentieth century. In it Verdi used many little motifs and mottos, introduced and dropped, then brought up again later, rather than long suspended melodies. Just as the audience expects a character to launch into a long melody, a new character speaks. This fashion exercised tremendous influence on his successors Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten.

  After Verdi came the sentimental realistic melodrama of verismo. Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci introduced the style, which came to dominate the world's stages through Puccini's La bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly.

• 6. Wagner's Complete Work Of Art

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  Bayreuth was built for one composer's vision. Richard Wagner constructed his own opera house there with part of the patronage from Ludwig II of Bavaria, dedicated exclusively to performing his own works in the style he wanted. He was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history, and for many composers his legacy proved a heavy burden.

  Wagner evolved a new concept of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art, fusing music, poetry, and painting. He greatly increased the role and power of the orchestra, creating scores with a complex web of leitmotifs, recurring themes often associated with the characters and concepts of the drama. Prototypes of these can be heard in his earlier operas Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin. His score to Das Rheingold calls for six harps.

  In his mature music dramas Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal, the orchestra often played the recurrent leitmotifs, a role which elevated its status to that of a prima donna. He was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such as tonality, in his quest for greater expressivity. The move away from traditional tonality had begun with Wagner, particularly the Tristan chord.

  Richard Strauss accepted Wagnerian ideas but took them in new directions. He first won fame with the scandalous Salome and the dark tragedy Elektra, in which tonality was pushed to the limits. Then he changed tack in his greatest success, Der Rosenkavalier, where Mozart and Viennese waltzes became as important an influence as Wagner.

• 7. Modernism And The Shrinking Orchestra

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  Atonality is the most obvious mark of modernism in opera. Operatic modernism truly began with two Viennese composers, Arnold Schoenberg and his student Alban Berg, both advocates of atonality and its later development, dodecaphony. Schoenberg's Erwartung, composed in 1909 and premiered in 1924, displays heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance, and he occasionally used Sprechstimme.

  Berg's two operas remained in standard repertory where others did not. Wozzeck, from 1925, and Lulu, incomplete at his death in 1935, combined Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique with melodic passages of a more traditionally tonal nature, quite Mahlerian in character. That blend perhaps explains their survival despite controversial music and plots.

  Neoclassicism rose as a backlash against atonality. Ferruccio Busoni wrote the libretto for his neoclassical number opera Arlecchino in 1913. Igor Stravinsky, after composing the ballets Petrushka in 1911 and The Rite of Spring in 1913, turned to neoclassicism in his opera-oratorio Oedipus rex in 1927.

  Smaller orchestras became a cost-cutting measure across the 20th century. As government and private patronage of the arts decreased, the grand Romantic-era orchestras with huge string sections and multiple harps were no longer feasible. Many of Benjamin Britten's operas are scored for as few as 13 instrumentalists. A newer trend was the contemporary historical opera, dramatizing events in recent living memory. John Adams wrote The Death of Klinghoffer, Nixon in China, and Doctor Atomic, where characters portrayed onstage were alive at the time of the premiere.

• 8. Screens, Subsidies, And Aging Audiences

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  Beginning in 2006, the Metropolitan Opera started live high-definition video transmissions to cinemas around the world. In 2007, Met performances were shown in over 424 theatres in 350 US cities, and La bohème went out to 671 screens worldwide. San Francisco Opera began prerecorded video transmissions in March 2008. Since 2009, complete performances can be downloaded and are live streamed.

  Television came first. On the 24th of December 1951, the live broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors, an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti, became the first opera specifically composed for television in America. In 1992 in Italy, Tosca was broadcast live from its original Roman settings and times of day, with the first act from the 16th-century Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle at noon on Saturday and transmitted via satellite to 105 countries.

  Public money keeps the European houses alive. In Milan, 60% of La Scala's annual budget of 115 million euros comes from ticket sales and private donations, with the remaining 40% from public funds. In 2005, La Scala received 25% of Italy's total state subsidy of 464 million euros for the performing arts. Germany has about 80 year-round opera houses, while the US, with more than three times the population, does not have any, and even the Met only has a seven-month season.

  The audience is graying. The Met reported in 2011 that the average age of its audience was 60. Efforts to draw younger listeners lowered that to 58 by 2018, while the Berlin State Opera reported 54 and the Paris Opera reported 48. Supertitles, first condemned as a distraction when they appeared in the 1980s, now run above the proscenium arch or on individual seat screens, the quiet technology that decides whether the next listener in that aging room ever comes back.