An opera is a dramatic work in which the dialogue is sung (usually in its entirety) rather than spoken. The form had its origins around 1600 in an attempt by a group of Italian intellectuals to replicate the declamation of ancient Greek drama. Opera found its first champion among composers of stature in Claudio Monteverdi, whose Orfeo (1607) was the first in a long series of works that told the tailor-made-for-opera story of a musician who tried to rescue his wife from the underworld through the power of song. (read more)

An opera is a dramatic work in which the dialogue is sung (usually in its entirety) rather than spoken. The form had its origins around 1600 in an attempt by a group of Italian intellectuals to replicate the declamation of ancient Greek drama. Opera found its first champion among composers of stature in Claudio Monteverdi, whose Orfeo (1607) was the first in a long series of works that told the tailor-made-for-opera story of a musician who tried to rescue his wife from the underworld through the power of song. Through much of of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opera was an important part of European life among noble families and powerful merchants. More and more often, operas of the Baroque era (Handel's Italian operas were among the greatest of their time) are being revived by young and charismatic performers like Cecilia Bartoli and Vivica Genaux. But for most opera lovers, the golden age of the genre runs from the works of Gluck and Mozart in the late eighteenth century up to Berg's grim Wozzeck and other modernist monuments of the twentieth -- with new works still contending for space on operatic stages every year. Italian was the primary language of opera for over two centuries, and Mozart's pair of operatic masterpieces, the comic Le nozze di Figaro and the tragic Don Giovanni, were written in that language even though they were aimed at audiences in Austria. The gloriously melodic Italian operas of the early nineteenth century, by composers such as Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, are still popular today. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries operas were broken up into "recitative" (ress-it-a-TEEVE, dialogue sections in which speech-like singing prevails) and "arias," or melodic set pieces, but later in the career of the greatest Italian opera composer, Giuseppe Verdi, this distinction broke down in favor of a continuous flow of music. Verdi's career encompassed early aria-based works like La traviata (1853), the passionate and exotic Aida (1871) and other ambitious works of the composer's late middle age, and the Shakespearean Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), late works that summed up a lifetime of musical development. Verdi was influenced by the large structures and sweeping social themes of French grand opera and also by the works of the century's other operatic titan, Germany's Richard Wagner. Wagner's gigantic "music dramas" (as he called them), many of them based on Germanic mythology and history, strove to merge music, text, and stage design in an overall experience that pushed artistic boundaries on many fronts. Perhaps the culmination of Wagner's art was the so-called "Ring cycle" of four linked operas set among a pantheon of Norse gods. Wagner's operas were notable for their intricate use of musical markers, known as leitmotives, to identify characters and ideas. The world of twentieth-century opera is as varied as the societies that nurtured it, with Puccini and his inimitable Tosca and La bohème carrying forward the Italian tradition, Richard Strauss extending Wagner's ideas in Elektra and other works, English and American composers such as Britten and Gershwin writing works in their native tongue, and a host of new ideas coming to the fore. In recent years, the minimalist composer John Adams has experienced success with Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), each seemingly ripped from the headlines describing major world events.(collapse)