   #copyright

Opera

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Poetry & Opera

   The Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Founded in 1778, La Scala is one of the
   world's most famous opera houses.
   Enlarge
   The Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Founded in 1778, La Scala is one of the
   world's most famous opera houses.
   The Sydney Opera House is one of the world's most recognizable opera
   houses and landmarks.
   Enlarge
   The Sydney Opera House is one of the world's most recognizable opera
   houses and landmarks.
   Bolshoi Theatre.
   Enlarge
   Bolshoi Theatre.

   Opera is a form of theatre in which the drama is conveyed wholly or
   predominantly through music and singing. Opera emerged in Italy around
   the year 1600 and is generally associated with the Western classical
   music tradition. Opera uses many of the elements of spoken theatre such
   as scenery, costumes, and acting. Generally, however, opera is
   distinguished from other dramatic forms by the importance of song. The
   singers are accompanied by a musical ensemble ranging from a small
   instrumental ensemble to a full symphonic orchestra. Opera may also
   incorporate dance; this was especially true of French opera for much of
   its history.

   Comparable art forms from various other parts of the world, many of
   them ancient in origin, exist and are also sometimes called "opera" by
   analogy, usually prefaced with an adjective indicating the region (for
   example, Chinese opera). However, other than superficial similarities,
   these other art forms developed independently from and are unrelated to
   opera but are distinct art forms in their own right rather than mere
   derivatives of opera. Opera is not the only type of Western musical
   theatre: in the ancient world, Greek drama featured singing and
   instrumental accompaniment; and in modern times, other forms such as
   the musical have appeared.

Operatic terminology

   The words of an opera are known as the libretto (literally "little
   book"). Some composers, notably Richard Wagner, have written their own
   libretti; others have worked in close collaboration with their
   librettists, e.g. Mozart with Lorenzo da Ponte. Traditional opera
   consists of two modes of singing: recitative, the plot-driving passages
   often sung in a non-melodic style characteristic of opera, and aria (an
   "air" or formal song) in which the characters express their emotions in
   a more structured melodic style. Duets, trios and other ensembles often
   occur, and choruses are used to comment on the action. In some forms of
   opera, such as Singspiel, opéra comique, operetta, and semi-opera, the
   recitative is mostly replaced by spoken dialogue. Melodic or
   semi-melodic passages occurring in the midst of, or instead of,
   recitative, are also referred to as arioso. During the Baroque and
   Classical periods, recitative could appear in two basic forms: secco
   (dry) recitative, accompanied only by " continuo", which was often no
   more than a harpsichord; or accompagnato (also known as "stromentato")
   in which the orchestra provided accompaniment. By the 19th century,
   accompagnato had gained the upper hand, the orchestra played a much
   bigger role, and Richard Wagner revolutionised opera by abolishing
   almost all distinction between aria and recitative in his quest for
   what he termed "endless melody". Subsequent composers have tended to
   follow Wagner's example, though some, such as Stravinsky in his The
   Rake's Progress have bucked the trend. The terminology of the various
   kinds of operatic voices is described in Section 3 below.

History

Origins

   Claudio Monteverdi
   Enlarge
   Claudio Monteverdi

   The word opera means "works" in Italian (from the plural of Latin opus
   meaning "work" or "labour") suggesting that it combines the arts of
   solo and choral singing, declamation, acting and dancing in a staged
   spectacle. Dafne by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered
   opera, as understood today. It was written around 1597, largely under
   the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who
   gathered as the " Camerata". Significantly, Dafne was an attempt to
   revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of
   antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. The members of the
   Camerata considered that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas were
   originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera
   was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation. Dafne is
   unfortunately lost. A later work by Peri, Euridice, dating from 1600,
   is the first opera score to have survived to the present day. The
   honour of being the first opera still to be regularly performed,
   however, goes to Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo, composed for the court of
   Mantua in 1607.

Italian opera

The Baroque era

   Opera did not remain confined to court audiences for long; in 1637 the
   idea of a "season" ( Carnival) of publicly-attended operas supported by
   ticket sales emerged in Venice. Monteverdi had moved to the city from
   Mantua and composed his last operas, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and
   L'incoronazione di Poppea, for the Venetian theatre in the 1640s. His
   most important follower Francesco Cavalli helped spread opera
   throughout Italy. In these early Baroque operas, broad comedy was
   blended with tragic elements in a mix that jarred some educated
   sensibilities, sparking the first of opera's many reform movements,
   sponsored by Venice's Arcadian Academy which came to be associated with
   the poet Metastasio, whose libretti helped crystallize the genre of
   opera seria, which became the leading form of Italian opera until the
   end of the 18th century. Once the Metastasian ideal had been firmly
   established, comedy in Baroque-era opera was reserved for what came to
   be called opera buffa.

   Opera seria was elevated in tone and highly stylised in form, usually
   consisting of secco recitative interspersed with long da capo arias.
   These afforded great opportunity for virtuosic singing and during the
   golden age of opera seria the singer really became the star. The role
   of the hero was usually written for the castrato voice; castrati such
   as Farinelli and Senesino, as well as female sopranos such as Faustina
   Bordoni, became in great demand throughout Europe as opera seria ruled
   the stage in every country except France. Italian opera set the Baroque
   standard. Italian libretti were the norm, even when a German composer
   like Handel found himself writing for London audiences. Italian
   libretti remained dominant in the classical period as well, for example
   in the operas of Mozart, who wrote in Vienna near the century's close.
   Leading Italian-born composers of opera seria include Alessandro
   Scarlatti, Vivaldi and Porpora.

Reform: Gluck, the attack on the Metastasian ideal, and Mozart

   Opera seria had its weaknesses and critics, and the taste for
   embellishment on behalf of the superbly trained singers, and the use of
   spectacle as a replacement for dramatic purity and unity drew attacks.
   Francesco Algarotti's Essay on the Opera (1755) proved to be an
   inspiration for Christoph Willibald Gluck's reforms. He advocated that
   opera seria had to return to basics and that all the various elements
   -- music (both instrumental and vocal), ballet, and staging -- must be
   subservient to the overriding drama. Several composers of the period,
   including Niccolò Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta, attempted to put these
   ideals into practice. The first to really succeed and to leave a
   permanent imprint upon the history of opera, however, was Gluck. Gluck
   tried to achieve a "beautiful simplicity". This is illustrated in the
   first of his "reform" operas, Orfeo ed Euridice, where vocal lines
   lacking in the virtuosity of (say) Handel's works are supported by
   simple harmonies and a notably richer-than-usual orchestral presence
   throughout.

   Gluck's reforms have had resonance throughout operatic history. Weber,
   Mozart and Wagner, in particular, were influenced by his ideals.
   Mozart, in many ways Gluck's successor, combined a superb sense of
   drama, harmony, melody, and counterpoint to write a series of comedies,
   notably Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni (in
   collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte) which remain among the most-loved,
   popular and well-known operas today. But Mozart's contribution to opera
   seria was more mixed; by his time it was dying away, and in spite of
   such fine works as Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito, he would not
   succeed in bringing the art form back to life again.
     * K527 —
          + Overture from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni
     * Der Hölle Rache —
          + From Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Magic Flute
     * Problems playing the files? See media help.

Bel canto, Verdi and verismo

   Giuseppe Verdi, by Giovanni Boldini, 1886 (National Gallery of Modern
   Art, Rome)
   Enlarge
   Giuseppe Verdi, by Giovanni Boldini, 1886 (National Gallery of Modern
   Art, Rome)

   The bel canto opera movement flourished in the early 19th century and
   is exemplified by the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Pacini,
   Mercadante and many others. Literally "beautiful singing", bel canto
   opera derives from the Italian stylistic singing school of the same
   name. Bel canto lines are typically florid and intricate, requiring
   supreme agility and pitch control.

   Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly
   popularized by Giuseppe Verdi, beginning with his biblical opera
   Nabucco. Verdi's operas resonated with the growing spirit of Italian
   nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era, and he quickly became an icon
   of the patriotic movement (although his own politics were perhaps not
   quite so radical). In the early 1850s, Verdi produced his three most
   popular operas: Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. But he
   continued to develop his style, composing perhaps the greatest French
   Grand opera, Don Carlos, and ending his career with two
   Shakespeare-inspired works, Otello and Falstaff, which reveal how far
   Italian opera had grown in sophistication since the early 19th century.

   After Verdi, the sentimental "realistic" melodrama of verismo appeared
   in Italy. This was a style introduced by Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria
   Rusticana and Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci that came virtually to
   dominate the world's opera stages with such popular works as Giacomo
   Puccini's La Boheme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly. Later Italian
   composers, such as Berio and Nono, have experimented with modernism.
     * La donna è mobile —
          + Enrico Caruso sings La donna è mobile, from Giuseppe Verdi's
            Rigoletto ( 1908)
     * No Pagliaccio non son —
          + From Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Performed by Enrico
            Caruso
     * Problems playing the files? See media help.

French opera

   1875 poster for Bizet's Carmen
   Enlarge
   1875 poster for Bizet's Carmen

   In rivalry with imported Italian opera productions, a separate French
   tradition was founded by the Italian Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court
   of King Louis XIV. Despite his foreign origin, Lully established an
   Academy of Music and monopolised French opera from 1672. Starting with
   Cadmus et Hermione, Lully and his librettist Quinault created tragédie
   en musique,a form in which dance music and choral writing were
   particularly prominent. Lully's operas also show a concern for
   expressive recitative which matched the contours of the French
   language. In the 18th century, Lully's most important successor was
   Rameau, who composed five tragédies en musique as well as numerous
   works in other genres such as opera-ballet, all notable for their rich
   orchestration and harmonic daring. After Rameau's death, the German
   Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for the Parisian stage in the
   1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with
   greater focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the 18th
   century another genre was gaining popularity in France: opéra comique.
   This was the equivalent of the German singspiel, where arias alternated
   with spoken dialogue. Notable examples in this style were produced by
   Monsigny, Philidor and, above all, Grétry. During the Revolutionary
   period, composers such as Méhul and Cherubini, who were followers of
   Gluck, brought a new seriousness to the genre, which had never been
   wholly "comic" in any case.

   By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for
   Italian bel canto, especially after the arrival of Rossini in Paris.
   Rossini's Guillaume Tell helped found the new genre of Grand opera, a
   form whose most famous exponent was another foreigner, Giacomo
   Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer's works, such as Les Huguenots emphasised virtuoso
   singing and extraordinary stage effects. Lighter opéra comique also
   enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boïeldieu, Auber, Hérold and
   Adolphe Adam. In this climate, the operas of the French-born composer
   Hector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing. Berlioz's epic masterpiece
   Les Troyens, the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a
   full performance for almost a hundred years.

   In the second half of the 19th century, Jacques Offenbach created
   operetta with witty and cynical works such as Orphée aux enfers;
   Charles Gounod scored a massive success with Faust; and Bizet composed
   Carmen, which, once audiences learned to accept its blend of
   Romanticism and realism, became the most popular of all opéra comiques.
   Massenet, Saint-Saëns and Delibes all composed works which are still
   part of the standard repertory. At the same time, the influence of
   Richard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition. Many
   French critics angrily rejected Wagner's music dramas while many French
   composers closely imitated them with variable success. Perhaps the most
   interesting response came from Claude Debussy. As in Wagner's works,
   the orchestra plays a leading role in Debussy's unique opera Pelléas et
   Mélisande ( 1902) and there are no real arias, only recitative. But the
   drama is understated, enigmatic and completely unWagnerian.

   Other notable 20th century names include Ravel, Dukas, Roussel and
   Milhaud. Francis Poulenc is one of the very few post-war composers of
   any nationality whose operas (which include Dialogues des carmélites))
   have gained a foothold in the international repertory. Olivier
   Messiaen's lengthy sacred drama Saint François d'Assise ( 1983) has
   also attracted widespread attention.
     * Prelude —
          + From Georges Bizet's Carmen. Performed by the Damrosch
            Orchestra (1903)
          +

German-language opera

   The first German opera was Dafne, composed by Heinrich Schütz in 1627
   (the music has not survived). Italian opera held a great sway over
   German-speaking countries until the late 18th century. Nevertheless,
   native forms developed too. In 1644 Sigmund Staden produced the first
   Singspiel, a popular form of German-language opera in which singing
   alternates with spoken dialogue. In the late 17th and early 18th
   centuries, the Theatre am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg presented German operas
   by Keiser, Telemann and Handel. Yet many of the major German composers
   of the time, including Handel himself, as well as Graun, Hasse and
   later Gluck, chose to write most of their operas in foreign languages,
   especially Italian.

   Mozart's Singspiele, Die Entführung aus dem Serail ( 1782) and Die
   Zauberflöte ( 1791) were an important breakthrough in achieving
   international recognition for German opera. The tradition was developed
   in the 19th century by Beethoven with his Fidelio, inspired by the
   climate of the French Revolution. Carl Maria von Weber established
   German Romantic opera in opposition to the dominance of Italian bel
   canto. His Der Freischütz ( 1821) shows his genius for creating
   supernatural atmosphere. Other opera composers of the time include
   Marschner, Schubert, Schumann and Lortzing, but the most important
   figure was undoubtedly Richard Wagner.
   Illustration inspired by Wagner's music drama Das Rheingold Enlarge
   Illustration inspired by Wagner's music drama Das Rheingold

   Wagner was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in
   musical history. Starting under the influence of Weber and Meyerbeer,
   he gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a
   "complete work of art"), a fusion of music, poetry and painting. In his
   mature music dramas, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von
   Nürnberg, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, he abolished the
   distinction between aria and recitative in favour of a seamless flow of
   "endless melody".He greatly increased the role and power of the
   orchestra, creating scores with a complex web of leitmotivs, recurring
   themes often associated with the characters and concepts of the drama;
   and he was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such as
   tonality, in his quest for greater expressivity. Wagner also brought a
   new philosophical dimension to opera in his works, which were usually
   based on stories from Germanic or Arthurian legend. Finally, Wagner
   built his own opera house at Bayreuth, exclusively dedicated to
   performing his own works in the style he wanted.

   Opera would never be the same after Wagner and for many composers his
   legacy proved a heavy burden. On the other hand, Richard Strauss
   accepted Wagnerian ideas but took them in wholly new directions. He
   first won fame with the scandalous Salome and the dark tragedy Elektra,
   in which tonality was pushed to the limits. Then Strauss changed tack
   in his greatest success, Der Rosenkavalier, where Mozart and Viennese
   waltzes became as important an influence as Wagner. Strauss continued
   to produce a highly varied body of operatic works, often with libretti
   by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, right up until Capriccio in 1942.
   Other composers who made individual contributions to German opera in
   the early 20th century include Zemlinsky, Hindemith, Kurt Weill and the
   Italian-born Ferruccio Busoni. The operatic innovations of Arnold
   Schoenberg and his successors are discussed in the section on
   modernism.
     * Ride of the Valkyries —
          + Ride of the Valkyries, from Wagner's opera, Die Walküre
          +

English-language opera

   England's first notable composer working in operatic formats was John
   Blow, the composer of Venus and Adonis, often thought of as the first
   true English-language opera. Blow's immediate successor was the far
   more well-known Henry Purcell. Despite the success of his masterwork
   Dido and Aeneas, in which the action is furthered by the use of
   Italian-style recitative, much of Purcell's best work was not involved
   in the composing of typical opera but instead he usually worked within
   the constraints of the semi-opera format, where isolated scenes and
   masques are contained within the structure of a spoken play. The main
   characters of the play tend not to be involved in the musical scenes,
   which means that Purcell was rarely able to develop his characters
   through song. Despite these hindrances, his aim (and that of his
   collaborator John Dryden) was to establish serious opera in England,
   but these hopes ended with Purcell's early death at the age of 36.

   Following Purcell, for many years Great Britain was essentially an
   outpost of Italianate opera. Handel's opera serias dominated the London
   operatic stages for decades, and even home-grown composers such as
   Thomas Arne wrote using Italian models. This situation continued
   throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including Michael Balfe, except
   for ballad operas, such as John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which spoofed
   operatic conventions, and late Victorian era light operas, notably
   Arthur Sullivan's Savoy Operas. French operetta was also frequently
   heard in London through the 1870s.

   However, in the 20th century, English opera began to assert more
   independence with works of Ralph Vaughn Williams and in particular
   Benjamin Britten, who in a series of fine works that remain in standard
   repertory today revealed an excellent flair for the dramatic and superb
   musicality. Today composers such as Thomas Adès continue to export
   English opera abroad.
     * Stay, Prince and hear —
          + A scene from Purcell's operatic masterpiece, Dido and Aeneas.
            The witches' messenger, in the form of Mercury himself,
            attempts to convince Aeneas to leave Carthage. Note the use of
            Italian-style recitative, a rarity in English opera at that
            time.
          +

   Also in the 20th century, American composers like Gershwin, Gian Carlo
   Menotti, and Carlisle Floyd began to contribute English-language operas
   infused with touches of popular musical styles. They were followed by
   modernists like Philip Glass, Mark Adamo, John Coolidge Adams, and Jake
   Heggie.

Russian opera

   Feodor Chaliapin as Ivan Susanin in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar
   Enlarge
   Feodor Chaliapin as Ivan Susanin in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar

   Opera was brought to Russia in the 1730s by the Italian operatic
   troupes and soon it became an important part of entertainment for the
   Russian Imperial Court and aristocracy. Many foreign composers such as
   Baldassare Galuppi, Giovanni Paisiello, Giuseppe Sarti, and Domenico
   Cimarosa (as well as various others) were invited to Russia to compose
   new operas, mostly in the Italian language. Simultaneously some
   domestic musicians like Maksym Berezovsky and Dmytro Bortniansky were
   sent abroad to learn to write operas. The first opera written in
   Russian was Tsefal i Prokris by the Italian composer Francesco Araja
   (1755). The development of Russian-language opera was supported by the
   Russian composers Vasily Pashkevich, Yevstigney Fomin and Alexey
   Verstovsky.

   However, the real birth of Russian opera came with Mikhail Glinka and
   his two great operas A Life for the Tsar, (1836) and Ruslan and
   Lyudmila (1842). After him in the 19th century in Russia there were
   written such operatic masterpieces as Rusalka and The Stone Guest by
   Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina by Modest
   Mussorgsky, Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin, Eugene Onegin and The
   Queen of Spades by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and The Snow Maiden and Sadko by
   Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. These developments mirrored the growth of
   Russian nationalism across the artistic spectrum, as part of the more
   general Slavophilism movement.

   In the 20th century the traditions of Russian opera were developed by
   many composers including Sergei Rachmaninov in his works The Miserly
   Knight and Franchesca da Rimini, Igor Stravinsky in Le rossignol,
   Mavra, Oedipus rex, and The Rake's Progress, Sergei Prokofiev in The
   Gambler, The Love for Three Oranges, The Fiery Angel, Betrothal in a
   Monastery, and War and Peace; as well as Dmitri Shostakovich in The
   Nose and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Edison Denisov in
   L'écume des jours, and Alfred Schnittke in Life With an Idiot, and
   Historia von D. Johann Fausten.

Other national operas

   Spain also produced its own distinctive form of opera, known as
   zarzuela, which had two separate flowerings: one in the 17th century,
   and another beginning in the mid-19th century. During the 18th century,
   Italian opera was immensely popular in Spain, supplanting the native
   form.

   Czech composers also developed a thriving national opera movement of
   their own in the 19th century, starting with Bedřich Smetana who wrote
   eight operas including the internationally popular The Bartered Bride.
   Antonín Dvořák, most famous for Rusalka, wrote 13 operas; and Leoš
   Janáček gained international recognition in the 20th century for his
   innovative works including Jenůfa, The Cunning Little Vixen, and Káťa
   Kabanová.

   The key figure of Hungarian national opera in the 19th century was
   Ferenc Erkel, whose works mostly dealt with historical themes. Among
   his most often performed operas are Hunyadi László and Bánk bán. The
   most famous modern Hungarian opera is Béla Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's
   Castle. Erkel's Polish equivalent was Stanislaw Moniuszko, most
   celebrated for the opera Straszny Dwór.

Contemporary, recent, and Modernist trends

Modernism

   Perhaps the most obvious stylistic manifestation of modernism in opera
   is the development of atonality. The move away from traditional
   tonality in opera had begun with Wagner, and in particular the Tristan
   chord, but after his death no further innovations in style were
   introduced for a considerable length of time. Composers such as Richard
   Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, Paul Hindemith and Hans Pfitzner adapted and
   worked within Wagnerian parameters but did not go very far beyond them.

   Operatic Modernism truly began in the operas of two Viennese composers,
   Arnold Schoenberg and his acolyte Alban Berg, both composers and
   advocates of atonality and its later development (as worked out by
   Schoenberg), dodecaphony. Schoenberg's early musico-dramatic works,
   Erwartung (1909, premiered in 1924) and Die Gluckliche Hand display
   heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance in general. Schoenberg
   also occasionally used Sprechstimme, which he described as: "The voice
   rising and falling relative to the indicated intervals, and everything
   being bound together with the time and rhythm of the music except where
   a pause is indicated".

   The two operas of Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg, Wozzeck and Lulu (left
   incomplete at his death) share many of the same characteristics as
   described above, though Berg combined his highly personal
   interpretation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique with melodic
   passages of a more traditionally tonal nature (quite Mahlerian in
   character) which perhaps partially explains why his operas have
   remained in standard repertory, despite their controversial music and
   plots. Schoenberg's theories have influenced (either directly or
   indirectly) significant numbers of opera composers ever since, even if
   they themselves did not compose using his techniques. Composers thus
   influenced include the Englishman Benjamin Britten, the German Hans
   Werner Henze, and the Russian Dmitri Shostakovich. ( Philip Glass also
   makes use of atonality, though his style is generally described as
   minimalist, usually thought of as another 20th century development.)

   However, operatic modernism's use of dodecaphony sparked a backlash
   among several leading composers. Prominent among the vanguard of these
   was the Russian Igor Stravinsky. After composing obviously Modernist
   music for the Diaghilev-produced ballets Petrushka and The Rite of
   Spring, in the 1920s Stravinsky turned to Neoclassicism, culminating in
   his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. When he did compose a full-length opera
   that was without doubt an opera (after his Rimsky-Korsakov-inspired
   works The Nightingale (1914), and Mavra (1922)), in the The Rake's
   Progress he continued to ignore serialist techniques and wrote an 18th
   century-style "number" opera, using diatonicism. His resistance to
   serialism proved to be an inspiration for many other composers.

Other trends

   A common trend throughout the 20th Century, in both opera and general
   orchestral repertoire, is the downsizing of orchestral forces. As
   patronage of the arts decreases, new works are commissioned and
   performed with smaller budgets, very often resulting in chamber-sized
   works, and one act operas. Many of Benjamin Britten's operas are scored
   for as few as 13 instrumentalists; Mark Adamo's two-act realization of
   Little Women is scored for 18 instrumentalists.

   Another feature of 20th Century opera is the emergence of contemporary
   historical operas. The Death of Klinghoffer and Nixon in China by John
   Adams, and Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie exemplify the dramatisation
   on stage of events in recent living memory, where characters portrayed
   in the opera were alive at the time of the premiere performance.
   Earlier models of opera generally stuck to more distant history,
   re-telling contemporary fictional stories (reworkings of popular
   plays), or mythical/legendary stories.

   The Metropolitan Opera reports that the average age of its patrons is
   now 60. Many opera companies, have experienced a similar trend, and
   opera company websites are replete with attempts to attract a younger
   audience. This trend is part of the larger trend of greying audiences
   for classical music since the last decades of the 20th century.

From musicals back towards opera

   Also by the late 1930s, some musicals began to be written with a more
   operatic structure. These works include complex polyphonic ensembles
   and reflect musical developments of their times. Porgy and Bess,
   influenced by jazz styles, and Candide, with its sweeping, lyrical
   passages and farcical parodies of opera, both opened on Broadway but
   became accepted as part of the opera repertory. Show Boat, West Side
   Story, Brigadoon, Sweeney Todd, Evita and others tell dramatic stories
   through complex music and are now sometimes seen in opera houses. Some
   musicals, beginning with Tommy (1969) and Jesus Christ Superstar
   (1971), are through-composed, written with recitative instead of
   dialogue, telling their emotional stories predominantly through the
   music, and are styled rock operas.

Operatic voices

   Singers and the roles they play are initially classified according to
   their vocal ranges. Male singers are classified by vocal range as bass,
   bass-baritone, baritone, tenor and countertenor. Female singers are
   classified by vocal range as contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano.
   Additionally, singers' voices are loosely identified by characteristics
   other than range, such as timbre or colour, vocal quality, agility,
   power, and tessitura. Thus a soprano may be termed a lyric soprano,
   coloratura, soubrette, spinto, or dramatic soprano; these terms,
   although not fully describing a singing voice, associate the singer's
   voice with the roles most suitable to the singer's vocal
   characteristics. The German Fach system is an especially organized
   system of vocal classification. A particular singer's voice may change
   drastically over his or her lifetime, rarely reaching vocal maturity
   until the third decade, and sometimes not until middle age.

Histories

   The soprano voice has typically been used throughout operatic history
   as the voice of choice for the female protagonist of the opera in
   question. The current emphasis on a wide vocal range was primarily an
   invention of the Classical period. Before that, the vocal virtuosity,
   not range, was the priority, with soprano parts rarely extending above
   a high A ( Handel, for example, only wrote one role extending to a high
   C), though the castrato Farinelli was alleged to possess a top F. The
   contralto register enjoys only a limited operatic repertoire; hence the
   saying that contraltos only sing "Witches, bitches, and britches", and
   in recent years many of the trouser roles from the Baroque era have
   been assigned to countertenors.

   The tenor voice, from the Classical era onwards, has traditionally been
   assigned the role of male protagonist. Many of the most challenging
   tenor roles in the repertory were written during the bel canto era,
   such as Donizetti's sequence of 9 Cs above middle C during La fille du
   régiment. With Wagner came an emphasis on vocal weight for his
   protagonist roles, the vocal category of which is described by the term
   heldentenor. Bass roles have a long history in opera, having been used
   in opera seria for comic relief (and as a contrast to the preponderance
   of high voices in this genre). The bass repertoire is wide and varied,
   stretching from the buffo comedy of Leporello in Don Giovanni to the
   nobility of Wotan in Wagner's Ring Cycle. In between the bass and the
   tenor is the baritone.
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