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Opera

Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist[1] and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another.[2]

This article is about the Western art form. For the web browser, see Opera (web browser). For others, see Opera (disambiguation).

Opera is a key part of Western classical music, and Italian in particular, tradition.[3] Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as Singspiel and Opéra comique. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of singing: recitative, a speech-inflected style,[4] and self-contained arias. The 19th century saw the rise of the continuous music drama.


Opera originated in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri's mostly lost Dafne, produced in Florence in 1598) especially from works by Claudio Monteverdi, notably L'Orfeo, and soon spread through the rest of Europe: Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England all helped to establish their national traditions in the 17th century. In the 18th century, Italian opera continued to dominate most of Europe (except France), attracting foreign composers such as George Frideric Handel. Opera seria was the most prestigious form of Italian opera, until Christoph Willibald Gluck reacted against its artificiality with his "reform" operas in the 1760s. The most renowned figure of late 18th-century opera is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who began with opera seria but is most famous for his Italian comic operas, especially The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, as well as Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), and The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), landmarks in the German tradition.


The first third of the 19th century saw the high point of the bel canto style, with Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini all creating signature works of that style. It also saw the advent of grand opera typified by the works of Daniel Auber and Giacomo Meyerbeer as well as Carl Maria von Weber's introduction of German Romantische Oper (German Romantic Opera). The mid-to-late 19th century was a golden age of opera, led and dominated by Giuseppe Verdi in Italy and Richard Wagner in Germany. The popularity of opera continued through the verismo era in Italy and contemporary French opera through to Giacomo Puccini and Richard 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 (Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg), neoclassicism (Igor Stravinsky), and minimalism (Philip Glass and John Adams). With the rise of recording technology, singers such as Enrico Caruso and Maria Callas became known to much wider audiences that went beyond the circle of opera fans. Since the invention of radio and television, operas were also performed on (and written for) these media. Beginning in 2006, a number of major opera houses began to present live high-definition video transmissions of their performances in cinemas all over the world. Since 2009, complete performances can be downloaded and are live streamed.

Language and translation issues[edit]

Since the days of Handel and Mozart, many composers have favored Italian as the language for the libretto of their operas. From the Bel Canto era to Verdi, composers would sometimes supervise versions of their operas in both Italian and French. Because of this, operas such as Lucia di Lammermoor or Don Carlos are today deemed canonical in both their French and Italian versions.[57]


Until the mid-1950s, it was acceptable to produce operas in translations even if these had not been authorized by the composer or the original librettists. For example, opera houses in Italy routinely staged Wagner in Italian.[58] After World War II, opera scholarship improved, artists refocused on the original versions, and translations fell out of favor. Knowledge of European languages, especially Italian, French, and German, is today an important part of the training for professional singers. "The biggest chunk of operatic training is in linguistics and musicianship", explains mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick. "[I have to understand] not only what I'm singing, but what everyone else is singing. I sing Italian, Czech, Russian, French, German, English."[59]


In the 1980s, supertitles (sometimes called surtitles) began to appear. Although supertitles were first almost universally condemned as a distraction,[60] today many opera houses provide either supertitles, generally projected above the theatre's proscenium arch, or individual seat screens where spectators can choose from more than one language. TV broadcasts typically include subtitles even if intended for an audience who knows well the language (for example, a RAI broadcast of an Italian opera). These subtitles target not only the hard of hearing but the audience generally, since a sung discourse is much harder to understand than a spoken one—even in the ears of native speakers. Subtitles in one or more languages have become standard in opera broadcasts, simulcasts, and DVD editions.


Today, operas are only rarely performed in translation. Exceptions include the English National Opera, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, and Opera South East,[61] which favor English translations.[62] Another exception are opera productions intended for a young audience, such as Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel[63] and some productions of Mozart's The Magic Flute.[64]

including a general list as well as by theme, by country, by medium, and by venue

Lists of operas

List of fictional literature featuring opera

Opera management

Radio opera

, ed. (1969). Harvard Dictionary of Music (2nd ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-37501-7.

Apel, Willi

Cooke, Mervyn (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera. Cambridge: . ISBN 0-521-78009-8. See also Google Books partial preview.

Cambridge University Press

, 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, 1-56159-228-5

The New Grove Dictionary of Opera

The Viking Opera Guide, edited by (1994), 1,328 pages, ISBN 0-670-81292-7

Amanda Holden

The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. (1994)

Roger Parker

The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, by and Ewan West (1992), 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5

John Warrack

Opera, the Rough Guide, by Matthew Boyden et al. (1997), 672 pages,  1-85828-138-5

ISBN

Opera: A Concise History, by Leslie Orrey and , World of Art, Thames & Hudson

Rodney Milnes

; Parker, Roger (2012). A History of Opera. New York: W W Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-05721-8.

Abbate, Carolyn

: An Invitation to the Opera, Anchor Books, 1986/91. ISBN 0-385-26339-2.

DiGaetani, John Louis

Dorschel, Andreas, 'The Paradox of Opera', 30 (2001), no. 4, pp. 283–306. ISSN 0008-199X (print). ISSN 1471-6836 (electronic). Discusses the aesthetics of opera.

The Cambridge Quarterly

"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.

Silke Leopold

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.  978-1-884822-79-7

ISBN

Howard Mayer Brown, "Opera", . 2001. Oxford University Press

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Rous, Samuel Holland (1919). The Victrola Book of the Opera. Stories of The Operas with Illustrations.... Camden, New Jersey: Victor Talking Machine Company. at Internet Archive.

View

Simon, Henry W.: A Treasury of Grand Opera, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1946.

Herbert Weinstock and Barbara Russano Hanning, Encyclopædia Britannica

"Opera"

Valls, María Antonia (1989). Hitos de la Música Universal y Retratos de sus Grandes Protagonistas. (Illustrated by ). Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores.

Willi Glasauer

Operabase

Comprehensive opera performances database

opera and aria guides, biographies, history

Opera-Inside

StageAgent – synopses and character descriptions for most major operas

What's it about? – Opera plot summaries

Archived 28 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine (in French)

Vocabulaire de l'Opéra

OperaGlass, a resource at Stanford University

HistoricOpera – historic operatic images

By Jonathan Leaf, The American, July/August 2007 Issue

"America's Opera Boom"

Opera~Opera article archives

. Theatre and Performance. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 15 February 2011.

"A History of Opera"