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Opera

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Operatic terminology#

The words of an opera are known as the libretto (meaning “small book”). Some composers, notably Wagner, have written their own libretti; others have worked in close collaboration with their librettists, e.g. Mozart with Lorenzo Da Ponte. Traditional opera, often referred to as “number opera”, consists of two modes of singing: recitative, the plot-driving passages sung in a style designed to imitate and emphasise the inflections of speech, During both the Baroque and Classical periods, recitative could appear in two basic forms, each of which was accompanied by a different instrumental ensemble: (dry) recitative, sung with a free rhythm dictated by the accent of the words, accompanied only by , which was usually a harpsichord and a cello; or (also known as ) in which the orchestra provided accompaniment. Over the 18th century, arias were increasingly accompanied by the orchestra. By the 19th century, had gained the upper hand, the orchestra played a much bigger role, and Wagner revolutionised opera by abolishing almost all distinction between aria and recitative in his quest for what Wagner 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 changing role of the orchestra in opera is described in more detail below.

Opera buffa

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Opéra bouffon#

Opéra bouffon is the French term for the Italian genre of opera buffa (comic opera) performed in 18th-century France, either in the original language or in French translation. It was also applied to original French opéras comiques having Italianate or near-farcical plots. The term was also later used by Jacques Offenbach for five of his operettas (Orphée aux enfers, Le pont des soupirs, Geneviève de Brabant, and Le voyage de MM. Dunanan père et fils ), and is sometimes confused with the French opéra comique and opéra bouffe.

Opéra comique

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Use of the term#

The term opéra comique is complex in meaning and cannot simply be translated as “comic opera”. The genre originated in the early 18th century with humorous and satirical plays performed at the theatres of the Paris fairs which contained songs (vaudevilles), with new words set to already existing music. The phrase opéra comique en vaudevilles or similar was often applied to these early-stage works. In the middle of the 18th century, composers began to write original music to replace the vaudevilles, under the influence of the lighter types of Italian opera (especially Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona). This form of opéra comique was often known as comédie mêlée d’ariettes, but the range of subject matter it covered expanded beyond the merely comic. By the 19th century, opéra comique often meant little more than works with spoken dialogue performed at the Opéra-Comique theatre, as opposed to works with recitative delivery which appeared at the Paris Opéra. Thus, probably the most famous of all opéras comiques, Georges Bizet’s Carmen, is on a tragic subject. As Elizabeth Bartlet and Richard Langham Smith note in their Grove article on the subject, composers and librettists frequently rejected the use of the umbrella term opéra comique in favor of more precise labels.

Opera in Azerbaijan

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19th and early 20th centuries. Russian Empire#

The emergence of opera and ballet in Azerbaijan is associated with the Imperial Russian period of history when the inhabitants populating what is now the Republic of Azerbaijan became exposed to European music traditions first-hand. The very first documented performance of an opera in Baku took place in May 1889 when Alexey Verstovsky’s opera Askold’s grave was staged at a circus arena in Baku (on the site of the current Azerbaijan Carpet Museum building), accompanied by the folk choir of Dmitry Agrenev-Slavyanski. In the early 1900s, opera troupes toured Baku on a yearly basis (except 1901 and 1913), featuring prominent singers of the time such as Natalia Ermolenko-Yuzhina and Antonina Nezhdanova. The Opera Theater in Baku was built in 1911 on the request of the Armenian Mailov brothers and by Armenian architect Nikolai Bayev.

Opera in German

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Birth#

The world’s first opera was Dafne by Jacopo Peri, which appeared in Florence in 1598. Three decades later Heinrich Schütz set the same libretto in a translation by the poet Martin Opitz, thus creating the first ever German-language opera. The music to Schütz’s Dafne is now lost and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of Hessen-Darmstadt to Princess Sophia Eleonora of Saxony in Torgau in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. Antonio Cesti was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza Il pomo d’oro for the imperial court in Vienna in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German-speaking lands throughout the Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In Nuremberg in 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the “spiritual pastorale”, Seelewig, which foreshadows the Singspiel, a genre of German-language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. Seelewig was a moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.

Opera in Ukraine

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Origins#

The first operas to be performed in what is now independent Ukraine were Italian and French operas staged during the 18th century in the estates of the wealthy nobility. The first known opera known to be written by a composer from Ukraine, Demofont by Maxim Berezovsky, an Italian-style opera with a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, was premiered in 1773 in Livorno. Between 1776 and 1787, Dmytro Bortnyansky wrote three operas in Italian and three operas in French. The earliest opera house in the present territory of Ukraine was the , opened in Lemberg (now Lviv) in 1772. German operas were staged in Lemberg from 1774 to 1872, and Polish operas were performed there from 1780 to 1939. The Polish composer Henryk Jarecki worked there as the assistant and then the principal conductor from 1873 to 1900. In Kharkiv, the first opera house was opened in 1780, and a similar establishment was opened in Kyiv by 1803. The Odesa Opera House, built by the Russian Opera Society, was established in 1802. Odesa became an important centre of Italian and French opera due to its international importance as a trade centre. At first, opera houses in Ukraine did not employ their own artists, but instead hosted touring artists from abroad, the majority belonging to Italian opera companies. Local composers wrote operas in Italian, which until the beginning of the 20th century was the language used for all operatic performances in this part of the Russian Empire. In 1877, a German-language professional theatre opened in Chernivtsi, at that time Czernowitz and part of the Austor-Hungarian Empire. The heyday of opera (and musical life in general) in Czernowitz is associated with the violinist and composer Vojtěch Hřímalý (1842–1908), who staged his own operas in Czech. Until the emancipation reform of 1861, only the nobility in the Russian Empire parts of Ukraine could afford to keep orchestral players and actors, who were generally serfs. After the abolition of serfdom, the released musicians were able to work elsewhere. Alexey Verstovsky’s opera Askold’s Grave was staged on 27 October 1867, with musicians hired from the disbanded slave orchestra of and others brought from Saint Petersburg. Russian opera was staged in Kharkiv from 1874 until 1886, when the Kharkiv Theatre fell into disrepair; it was rebuilt in 1890. The Czech-born Russian composer Václav Suk conducted his opera (The Lord’s Forest) in Kharkiv in 1892. In Odesa, Russian operas were first staged in 1873. Following its destruction in a fire in 1883, the theatre there was rebuilt in 1887. Russian composers influenced by Ukrainian culture include Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (in Christmas Eve and May Night), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (with his opera Mazepa) and Alexander Borodin (Prince Igor). Within Ukraine, these operas were perceived by nationalists as possessing little of Ukrainian’s culture.

Opera seria

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Structure#

Opera seria built upon the conventions of the High Baroque era by developing and exploiting the da capo aria, with its A–B–A form. The first section presented a theme, the second a complementary one, and the third a repeat of the first with ornamentation and elaboration of the music by the singer. As the genre developed and arias grew longer, a typical opera seria would contain not more than thirty musical movements. A typical opera would start with an instrumental overture of three movements (fast-slow-fast), the so-called “Italian overture”, though often termed a sinfonia in the period. Following that would then be a series of recitatives in verso sciolto (freely alternating unrhymed seven- and eleven-syllable lines) containing dialogue, interspersed with arias in rhymed verse expressing the emotions of the character, this pattern only broken by the occasional duet for the leading amatory couple. The recitative was typically secco: that is, accompanied only by continuo (usually harpsichord, theorbo, and cello, sometimes supported by further bass and chordal instruments). At moments of especially violent passion secco was replaced by stromentato (or accompagnato) recitative, where the singer was accompanied by the entire body of strings. * Aria di bravura / Aria d’agilità * Aria cantabile * Aria di mezzo carattere * Aria parlante / Aria di strepito * Aria di portamento A fourfold classification using aria d’affetto, grouping aria di portamento with aria parlante, is also seen. These are supplemented by the following, which could be classified into more than one of the above, but are distinguished by instrumentation (concertata, unisono) or textual considerations (imitazione): * Aria concertata * Aria d’imitazione / simile aria * Aria all’unisono Opere serie were structured into three acts; at the end of Act III they would conclude with a final upbeat chorus (lieto fine, literally a “happy ending”), with all the characters to celebrate the jubilant climax.

Opéra-ballet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

The first work in the genre is generally held to be André Campra’s L’Europe galante (“Europe in Love”) of 1697, but Les Saisons of 1695 is often mentioned as the most distinctive prototype of this sort of composition Famous later examples are Les élémens (1721) by Destouches, Les Indes galantes (1735), and Les fêtes d’Hébé (1739) by Jean-Philippe Rameau.

References#

Anthony, James R. (2001). “Opéra-ballet” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan. (hardcover). (eBook). Also at Oxford Music Online (subscription required).
Bartlet, M. Elizabeth C. (1992). “Opéra-ballet”, vol. 3, pp. 683–684, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 volumes, edited by Stanley Sadie. New York: Grove. . Also at Oxford Music Online (subscription required).
Bellingham, Jane (2002). “opéra-ballet”, p. 862, in The Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Alison Latham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . Also at Oxford Music Online (subscription required).
Pitou, Spire (1983). The Paris Opéra. An Encyclopedia of Operas, Ballets, Composers, and Performers – Genesis and Glory, 1671-1715. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. .
Warrack, John; West, Ewan (1992). The Oxford Dictionary of Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press. .

Operatic pop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

According to music historians, operatic pop songs became most prevalent with the rise of Tin Pan Alley musicians during the early 1900s. One influence was the large influx of Italian immigrants to the United States who popularized singers such as Enrico Caruso and inspired the creation of “novelty songs” using Italian dialect. The songs often used operatic repertory “to make a satirical or topical point”. Other singers, including Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban, and Katherine Jenkins, also recorded the number. while his famous duet partner, British soprano Sarah Brightman, also gravitated considerably towards this combination of opera and pop music. In the 2000s, singers and singing groups devoted primarily to operatic pop built on this renewed success. Groups like Il Divo and Amici Forever have achieved popularity with the mix of “contemporary pop with operatic style” characteristic of operatic pop.

Operetta

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Definitions#

The term operetta arises in the mid-eighteenth-century Italy and it is first acknowledged as an independent genre in Paris around 1850. The definition of operetta has changed over the centuries and ranges depending on each country’s history with the genre. It is often used to refer to pieces that resemble the one-act compositions by Offenbach in contrast with his full length compositions, ‘opéra-bouffe’. Offenbach invented this art form in response to the French government’s oppressive laws surrounding the stagings of works that were larger than one act or contained more than four characters.

Oppari

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Content and theme#

The songs do not follow a set pattern; rather, the lyrics are sung impromptu, mostly improvised, and eulogise the person who has died. The oppari is also often centred around the relatives of the deceased and stresses the nature of the blood relation (mother, father, brother, sister etc.) between the person and the deceased. The oppari singer sings, wails and beats her chest and accompanied to the sounds of a beating drum she helps mourners bring their buried grief to the surface. A sample theme of a daughter lamenting father’s death is described below: Opparis are rich in wordplay relating to names and events associated with the deceased person. Colourful local idioms also decorate the lyrics. While oppari singing is still prominent in rural Tamil Nadu, the tradition had almost died out in urban Tamil Nadu.