opera
Instead of focusing on figures from mythology, as many composers before him had done, Mozart presented characters from everyday life. He also increased the role of the orchestra in opera. After Mozart's death, the next significant opera was Ludwig van Beethoven's Fidelio (1805). This was Beethoven's only opera.
The opera world expanded after the 18th century. Works from Italy, France, and Germany had been known in Russia for some time but it was not until the 19th century that Russian composers began creating their own operas. Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka's Ruslan i Lyudmila (1842; Ruslan and Lyudmila) was one of the first operas in Russian. The later operas of Aleksandr Borodin, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and Modest Mussorgsky contributed largely to what can be called “Russian” music.
The first great Russian opera was Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1874). Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (1879) is also an accomplished work.
In the early 19th century German composers were influenced by romanticism. This artistic movement produced emotional and very imaginative works. The master of this school was Carl Maria von Weber. His finest work is Der Freischütz (1821; The Freeshooter). It illustrates the romantic writers' love for dark forests, the supernatural, and the troubles of young love.
In the 19th century Paris, France, was the center of the “grand opera.” It was a large-scale operatic show—with elaborate scenery and costumes, ballets, and a host of performers. It vastly enlarged the importance of the orchestra in the drama.
In Italy, opera took a different direction. Composers such as Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini valued beautiful singing above all else. Rossini reigned as Italy's foremost composer in the early 19th century. While still in his teens, he composed the first of a string of 38 operas. Many of these are comic operas. Among them are Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816; The Barber of Seville) and La cenerentola (1817; Cinderella).
In 1839 an opera called Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio was staged in Milan, Italy. It started the career of perhaps the greatest of all later Italian composers of opera—Giuseppe Verdi. Among his famous operas are Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore (1853; The Troubadour), Aida (1871), Otello (1887), and Falstaff (1893).
At the same time that Verdi was composing in Italy, Richard Wagner was making his mark in Germany. His first success was Rienzi (1842), a five-act grand opera. In the following year he produced what many consider his first masterpiece—Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). Tristan und Isolde (1865) is sometimes regarded as the greatest German opera of the late 19th century. Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) is a series of four highly dramatic operas based on Germanic legends. The composer used a complex system of symbols to link the different themes of the four operas. Much of the later history of music reflects his influence.
The German composer Richard Strauss was greeted as the “heir to Wagner.” His reputation was established by two powerful operas—Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). Both works used unusual sounds and characters. His last opera was Capriccio (1942).
The spirit of modernism found its fullest expression in the music of three Viennese composers—Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern. Modernism is an artistic movement that emphasizes simplicity of design and avoids merely decorative details.
After Verdi, the most important Italian composer of opera was Giacomo Puccini. He wrote La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904). Puccini's Turandot was produced in 1926, after his death.
Russian composers of the 20th century wrote operas in Russian as well as other languages. Sergey Prokofiev's War and Peace (begun in the early 1940s and revised several times) was based on the novel of that name by the famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951) uses a English libretto by the poets W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman.
Among English composers few gained the success of Benjamin Britten. His finest works, including Peter Grimes (1945) and Billy Budd (1951), are performed regularly throughout the world.
The first significant U.S. opera composer was Virgil Thomson. His operas included Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947). George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) was considered by many to be the most significant American opera. Later American operas included Susannah (1955) by Carlisle Floyd, The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956) by Douglas Moore, Philip Glass's Satyagraha (1980), Nixon in China (1987) by John Adams, and William Bolcom's McTeague (1992).
At the beginning of the 21st century, most large opera companies continued to stage traditional operas by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, Richard Strauss, and a few others. Although new works are created internationally each year, the popularity of the classic operas continues to draw audiences to the theater. trios (for three voices), ensembles (for several voices singing together), and choruses. The parts are written for singers according to their voice ranges. The voice ranges, from highest to lowest, are soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass.
Although it is mainly a musical experience, an opera is also a theatrical production that must be staged. A designer creates the sets. A stage director coordinates the singers. A choreographer may plan the dance steps. And, finally, a conductor is responsible for leading the whole cast in its performance.
The origins of opera can be traced to ancient Greek drama and to the biblical plays of the Middle Ages. Singing, dancing, and the use of a chorus marked ancient Greek drama. The plays were performed with music, costumes, and basic sets.
However, modern opera is an Italian invention. It was developed by a group of musicians, poets, and scholars in Florence, Italy, in the late 16th century. They met regularly to discuss art and music. They wanted to revive what they thought was the art of the classical Greek theater, and they wrote dramatic pieces with musical accompaniment. One of the members of this group was the composer Jacopo Peri. The honor of being “the first opera” is held by Peri's Dafne (1597–98). The text of the piece was a work by the poet Ottavio Rinuccini. It was written down but only fragments of it have survived. In 1600 Peri wrote Euridice, which has survived intact. The success of the music established opera as a unique art form.
These early works were written as entertainment for the royal court in Florence. The form later spread to other parts of Italy through the work of Claudio Monteverdi. Monteverdi dramatically advanced the new music. He matched the look of the stage and the feel of the music to the ideals of the times. He also created strong music for his soloists and blended the high points of the drama more closely with the music. One such opera was Orfeo (1607).
Pier Francesco Cavalli, a student of Monteverdi, became the most popular composer of his era. He wrote more than 40 works over a period of 30 years and helped establish opera as a popular form of entertainment. In 1637 the Teatro di San Cassiano in Venice, Italy, became the first opera house to be opened to the general public.
Italian opera reached Germany in 1627, when Heinrich Schütz wrote a work based on Rinuccini's Dafne. The true founder of German opera is Reinhard Keiser, however. He wrote more than 100 works for the Hamburg Opera in the early 1700s.
The French opera evolved independently of the Italian influence. Robert Cambert's Pomone (1671) is considered the first French opera. Jean-Baptiste Lully was the leading French composer of this early era. His operas were full of dancing, choruses, instrumental pieces, and elaborate stage settings.
One of the first English operas was Dido and Aeneas (1689) by Henry Purcell. Purcell originally wrote it for a performance by the pupils at a girls' school in England. Later Purcell works included King Arthur (1691) and The Fairy Queen (1692).
A major composer of the 18th century was George Frideric Handel. Although he started writing in Hamburg, Germany, in 1705, his greater success came in London, England. His Rinaldo was produced there in 1711. During the next 40 years, Handel wrote more than 30 operas. In about 1737, he also began work on a new form known as oratorio. An oratorio is similar to opera because it features solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. However it is not staged, and it usually has a biblical text. Handel's Messiah (1741) is still a very popular musical work.
One of the greatest composers in history was the Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He began to write music when he was only 5 years old. His Le nozze di Figaro (1786; The Marriage of Figaro), Don Giovanni (1787), and Die Zauberflöte (1791; The Magic Flute), are considered to be some of the finest operas ever written.
As a drama that is set to music, an opera is a combination of several performing arts. It is performed on a stage with scenery by singers who are also actors. The music is played by an orchestra, which is usually in a pit in front of the stage. Often ballet or other types of dance are incorporated as well. American musicals such as West Side Story (1957) and The Lion King (1997) have their beginnings in opera.
The core of an opera lies in its text, which is called a libretto (from the Italian, meaning “little book”). Every opera starts with a composer and a librettist. The librettist writes or adapts the opera's story. Stories can be adapted from novels, plays, folklore, and other creative sources. They also can be taken from real life and can be written about real people from any period in history. They can be light comic stories or dramatic tragedies.
The composer sets the libretto to music. In some cases the entire opera is sung; in others, part of the text is spoken. During the course of an opera the story is told through arias (songs for a sing
