Florence's 1598 Dafne lit the fuse for sung Western drama
Opera is Western theatre in which music is fundamental and singers carry the dramatic roles; the Italian word simply means work. It began in late sixteenth-century Italy with Jacopo Peri's mostly lost Dafne, staged in Florence in 1598, and grew through Monteverdi into a pillar of classical music.
An opera is usually a partnership between a composer and a librettist, whose text is called the libretto, or little book. Some composers, Wagner above all, wrote their own words; Mozart worked closely with Lorenzo Da Ponte. The form folds in acting, sets, costume and sometimes ballet, and is normally accompanied by an orchestra, which has been directed by a conductor since the early nineteenth century. Traditional number opera alternates recitative, sung in rhythms that mimic speech to move the plot along, with arias, formal songs in which characters pour out feeling. Duets, trios and choruses add commentary, while halfway passages are called arioso. Some genres, such as Singspiel, opéra comique and operetta, swap recitative for spoken dialogue.
From Italy the art spread fast. Monteverdi's L'Orfeo set the pattern, and during the 1600s national schools took root under Purcell in England, Lully at the French court and Schütz among the Germans. Italian opera ruled most of eighteenth-century Europe apart from France and lured foreigners such as Handel. Its most prestigious form, opera seria, drew a reaction from Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose reform operas of the 1760s attacked its artifice. Mozart, the towering figure of the late century, is best loved for Italian comedies like The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, and for German works including The Magic Flute.
Early in the nineteenth century Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini brought bel canto to its peak, while Auber and Meyerbeer created grand opera and Weber launched German Romantic opera. The later century was a golden age dominated by Verdi in Italy and Wagner in Germany, who pushed toward continuous music drama, and new traditions flourished in Russia and Bohemia. Verismo, Puccini and Richard Strauss carried popularity into the twentieth century.
Modern composers experimented with atonality and serialism, as in Schoenberg and Berg, with Stravinsky's neoclassicism, and with the minimalism of Philip Glass and John Adams. Recordings made stars of Enrico Caruso and Maria Callas far beyond the opera house. Radio and television staged new works, major houses began beaming live high-definition performances into cinemas in 2006, and full productions have been streamed since 2009.
Source: Opera
