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A Brief Introduction of The Opera

Opera began in the late 16th century in Florence, Italy as a revival of ancient Greek dramas set to music. It soon spread across Italy and became popular entertainment for wealthy patrons, developing stylistic conventions over the centuries. By the 18th century, Italian opera had become a dominant art form performed internationally but also diversified with national styles emerging, most notably French opera. The 19th century saw opera's golden age with major composers like Rossini, Verdi, and Wagner expanding its musical and dramatic possibilities before the art form faced new challenges in the 20th century from other popular entertainment. However, opera has survived to the present day with continued new works being composed in the tradition.

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46 views3 pages

A Brief Introduction of The Opera

Opera began in the late 16th century in Florence, Italy as a revival of ancient Greek dramas set to music. It soon spread across Italy and became popular entertainment for wealthy patrons, developing stylistic conventions over the centuries. By the 18th century, Italian opera had become a dominant art form performed internationally but also diversified with national styles emerging, most notably French opera. The 19th century saw opera's golden age with major composers like Rossini, Verdi, and Wagner expanding its musical and dramatic possibilities before the art form faced new challenges in the 20th century from other popular entertainment. However, opera has survived to the present day with continued new works being composed in the tradition.

Uploaded by

Yawen Deng
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A brief Introduction of the Opera

THOMAS KELLY: I'm going to try to give a very quick history of opera.
There's a lot to the history of opera of course, but here are the highlights.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Opera starts around 1600 when a bunch of people in Florence
say the ancient Greeks sang when they did their dramas,
and we're Renaissance humanists.
We're reviving classical culture.
We'll write some plays and we'll have the people sing.
It caught on in Florence, it caught on in Mantua,
but it was private entertainment for rich people.
A little bit later in Venice, Monteverdi and others
took it up and built theaters and put on plays.
Mostly it was people singing in speech rhythm with an accompaniment.
It caught on in Rome, even in papal Rome where they didn't like theaters
but the Roman ones were all religious subjects, Saint this and Saint that.
But then it caught on in Naples and they built public theatres and now it begins
to become a little bit more lyrical.
It wasn't just singing and speech rhythm,
but it began to be a little bit like songs.
Naples sent composers out all over the world
and the Italian opera became almost universal.
Now by the end of the 17th century, they figured out
a way of how they wanted it to be an alternation between talking
and singing.
Recitative as they call it where the plot advances
and aria where somebody expresses emotion in song.
That Italian opera style spread all over everywhere, London, Paris, Germany,
and Russia.
Everywhere had an Italian opera company staffed by Italians sung in Italian
everywhere.
Except in France.
There, opera was imported by Italians, a guy
named Jean-Baptiste Lully, originally Giovanni Battista Lulli,
started composing operas in French.
The French have always been a little bit different.
In the 18th century, amazingly, things happened.
There's this German guy named Christoph Willibald Gluck,
who decides we're going to have more flexibility in opera,
integrate the chorus, change up some of the forms.
He writes operas in Paris in the middle of the 18th century,
then goes to Vienna at the end, where Mozart knows his work
and is personally acquainted with him.
By the end of the 18th century, it had gotten a little bit less rigid.
People like Mozart started including comic characters and serious characters
in the same operas and composing music where things actually
happened during the singing parts, rather than just during the rest
of the recitative section.
At the beginning of the 19th century, an Italian guy
named Gioachino Rossini becomes the most famous human being in Western culture.
He writes operas that are performed everywhere.
A couple of people that are like him in some ways--
Donizetti and Bellini we group into a category that's called Bel canto opera.
Bel canto means beautiful song.
And it really has beautiful, lyrical bits and lots of difficult, fast flourishes.
And that becomes the new standard for opera in the early 19th century.
At the same time in Paris, they have what's
called grand opera, which is all about spectacle.
You have boats floating by.
You have balloons, volcanoes.
You have all kinds of spectacular effects.
Grand opera is a technical word for what was going on in Paris in the 1830s.
But it influenced everybody who went through Paris, not just Meyerbeer,
and Auber, and Halévy who wrote the grand operas,
but also Wagner and Verdi, who both wrote grand operas for Paris and then
went on to do other things.
It was a kind of style that spread out to any place that
could afford the spectacle and the fancy singers you need.
In the 19th century, opera continues to be basically an Italian thing.
Giuseppe Verdi writes beautiful operas, ["Anvil Chorus" playing] and lots of them
that are known all over the world.
But in other countries they say, wait a minute.
Why do we have to have Italian operas?
Why can't we have German opera and Czech opera?
And so people in many, many different countries
began writing operas in other languages.
Carl Maria von Weber starts us off with German Romantic opera.
And later, Richard Wagner comes on the scene,
the guy who writes what he calls not operas, but music dramas.
It was revolutionary.
And everybody either loved or hated Wagner and that continues to this day.
We also have Russian composers like Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky
and Czech composers like Dvorak, Smetana, Janacek.
The main period of opera was the 18th and 19th centuries.
The 20th century has produced beautiful, beautiful operas
and so has the 21st century.
But by the 20th century, opera wasn't the grandest form of entertainment.
It wasn't the high-tech spectacle.
Opera wasn't the summit of everything anymore.
Now, we go to rock concerts, sports events, half-time shows,
things of that kind when we want to see the high-tech stuff.
But the tradition of opera has continued,
so we have a lot of wonderful 20th-century opera composers.
Not much happened in the way of English opera,
until Benjamin Britten in the 20th century.
Then there's Debussy.
We have lots and lots of operas by Puccini, by Richard Strauss,
and by all these other cool, modern people--
Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Baird, Stravinsky, Barber, Weill,
minimalist composers like Adams and Glass.
It's still going on.
You haven't seen many women here in this crowd,
but that is going to change in the future.
Watch Kaija Saariaho and her colleagues.
And it's also true that women have been the stars of opera
for its whole history.
It may be antiquated.
It may be old-fashioned.
But opera is still alive and well and has at least as long a future
as it had a past.
And there you go.
That was pretty quick.
[MUSIC PLAYING]

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