Opera in German is that of the German-speaking countries , which include Germany , Austria , and the historic German states that pre-date those countries.
152-694: German-language opera appeared remarkably quickly after the birth of opera itself in Italy. The first Italian opera was Jacopo Peri 's Dafne of 1598. In 1627, Heinrich Schütz provided the music for a German translation of the same libretto . Yet during much of the 17th and 18th centuries German-language opera would struggle to emerge from the shadow of its Italian-language rival, with leading composers from German-speaking parts of Europe, such as Handel and Gluck , opting to work in foreign traditions such as opera seria . Some Baroque composers, such as Reinhard Keiser , did try to challenge Italian dominance, and
304-519: A conductor . Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another. Opera is a key part of Western classical music , and Italian tradition in particular. Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres , including some that include spoken dialogue such as Singspiel and Opéra comique . In traditional number opera , singers employ two styles of singing: recitative ,
456-482: A "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts , such as acting , scenery , costume , and sometimes dance or ballet . The performance is typically given in an opera house , accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble , which since the early 19th century has been led by
608-749: A German-language opera troupe, the National Singspiel, at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The experiment was short-lived and the troupe was dissolved in 1783, yet the previous year it had produced one undoubted success with Die Entführung aus dem Serail by the young Mozart . Goethe immediately recognised the quality of the piece, declaring "it knocked us all sideways". In the following years commercial theatres sprang up in Vienna offering German-language opera. The impresario Emanuel Schikaneder had particular success with his Theater auf der Wieden on
760-605: 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 . 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
912-573: A cello; or accompagnato (also known as strumentato ) in which the orchestra provided accompaniment. Over the 18th century, arias were increasingly accompanied by the orchestra. By the 19th century, accompagnato had gained the upper hand, the orchestra played a much bigger role, and Wagner revolutionized 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
1064-506: A complex web of leitmotifs , recurring themes often associated with the characters and concepts of the drama, of which prototypes can be heard in his earlier operas such as Der fliegende Holländer , Tannhäuser and Lohengrin ; and he was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such as tonality , in his quest for greater expressivity. In his mature music dramas, Tristan und Isolde , Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal , he abolished
1216-475: A concern for expressive recitative which matched the contours of the French language. In the 18th century, Lully's most important successor was Jean-Philippe Rameau , who composed five tragédies en musique as well as numerous works in other genres such as opéra-ballet , all notable for their rich orchestration and harmonic daring. Despite the popularity of Italian opera seria throughout much of Europe during
1368-503: A growing repertoire of German operas appeared shortly after. This includes Günther von Schwarzburg , a through-composed opera noted then as now for its topic taken from German history, by composer Ignaz Holzbauer and librettist Anton Klein which premiered in 1777. An increasing amount of operas originally set to Italian and French texts by composers like André Ernest Modeste Grétry were translated and adopted for performance in German. By
1520-589: 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 , as well as the opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann ; Charles Gounod scored a massive success with Faust ; and Georges Bizet composed Carmen , which, once audiences learned to accept its blend of Romanticism and realism, became
1672-499: A highly varied body of operatic works, often with libretti by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal . Other composers who made individual contributions to German opera in the early 20th century include Alexander von Zemlinsky , Erich Korngold , Franz Schreker , Paul Hindemith , Kurt Weill and the Italian-born Ferruccio Busoni . The operatic innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and his successors are discussed in
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#17327797750061824-458: A large variety of works for stage. Perhaps, the most famous Iranian opera is Rostam and Sohrab by Loris Tjeknavorian premiered not until the early 2000s. Chinese contemporary classical opera , a Chinese language form of Western style opera that is distinct from traditional Chinese opera , has had operas dating back to The White-Haired Girl in 1945. In Latin America, opera started as
1976-514: A more traditionally tonal nature (quite Mahlerian in character). This perhaps partially explains why his operas have remained in standard repertory, despite their controversial music and plots. The years following World War I saw German and Austrian culture flourishing in spite of the surrounding political turmoil. Late Romantic composers were still at work alongside the avowed modernists Schoenberg and Berg. The Italian-born Ferruccio Busoni ploughed an individual furrow, attempting to fuse Bach and
2128-463: A new phrase. This fashion of opera directed opera from Verdi, onward, exercising tremendous influence on his successors Giacomo Puccini , Richard Strauss , and Benjamin Britten . After Verdi, the sentimental "realistic" melodrama of verismo appeared in Italy. This was a style introduced by Pietro Mascagni 's Cavalleria rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo 's Pagliacci that came to dominate
2280-528: A new seriousness to the genre, which had never been wholly "comic" in any case. Another phenomenon of this period was the 'propaganda opera' celebrating revolutionary successes, e.g. Gossec's Le triomphe de la République (1793). 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
2432-483: A nineteenth-century peak of Polish national opera . In the 20th century, other operas created by Polish composers included King Roger by Karol Szymanowski and Ubu Rex by Krzysztof Penderecki . The first known opera from Turkey (the Ottoman Empire ) was Arshak II , which was an Armenian opera composed by an ethnic Armenian composer Tigran Chukhajian in 1868 and partially performed in 1873. It
2584-507: A performance of Johann Theile 's Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch , based on the story of Adam and Eve . The theatre, however, would come to be dominated by the works of Reinhard Keiser , an enormously prolific composer who wrote over a hundred operas, sixty of them for Hamburg. Initially, the works performed in Hamburg had all been on religious themes in an attempt to ward off criticisms by Pietist church authorities that
2736-775: A result of European colonisation. The first opera ever written in the Americas was 1701's La púrpura de la rosa , by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco , a Peruvian composer born in Spain; a decade later, 1711's Partenope , by the Mexican Manuel de Zumaya , was the first opera written from a composer born in Latin America (music now lost). The first Brazilian opera for a libretto in Portuguese was A Noite de São João , by Elias Álvares Lobo . However, Antônio Carlos Gomes
2888-522: A separate French tradition was founded by the Italian-born French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of King Louis XIV . Despite his foreign birthplace, 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
3040-734: A speech-inflected style, and self-contained arias . The 19th century saw the rise of the continuous music drama . Opera originated in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri 's mostly lost Dafne , produced in Florence in 1598) especially from works by Claudio Monteverdi , notably L'Orfeo , and soon spread through the rest of Europe: Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England all helped to establish their national traditions in
3192-469: A superb sense of drama, harmony, melody, and counterpoint to write a series of comic operas with libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte , notably Le nozze di Figaro , Don Giovanni , and Così fan tutte , which remain among the most-loved, popular and well-known operas. 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
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#17327797750063344-451: A transatlantic exodus of composers which included Schoenberg, Weill, Korngold and Zemlinsky. Schreker had died in 1934, having been dismissed from his teaching post by the Nazis; other composers, such as the promising Viktor Ullmann , would perish in the death camps. Some opera composers, including Carl Orff , Werner Egk and the ageing Richard Strauss, remained in Germany to accommodate with
3496-412: A uniquely German form of opera under the influence of Romanticism . Weber's innovations were eclipsed by those of Wagner , one of the most revolutionary and controversial figures in musical history. Wagner strove to achieve his ideal of opera as "music drama", eliminating all distinction between aria and recitative , employing a complex web of leitmotifs and vastly increasing the power and richness of
3648-544: Is an opera in a prologue and five acts by the Italian composer Antonio Cesti with a libretto by Francesco Sbarra (1611-1668). It was first performed before the imperial court in a specially constructed open-air theatre Vienna in 1668. The work was so long it had to be staged over the course of two days: the Prologue, Acts One and Two were given on July 12; Acts Three, Four and Five on July 14. Originally planned to mark
3800-514: Is based on a tale from the Gespensterbuch ("Book of Wraiths") of Apel and Laun concerning a marksman who makes a pact with the Devil. Weber's strong point was his striking ability to evoke atmosphere through orchestral colour. From the very first bars of the overture, it is obvious we are in the primeval forests of Germany. The highlight of the opera is the chilling Wolf's Glen Scene in which
3952-622: Is generally regarded as the most outstanding Brazilian composer, having a relative success in Italy with its Brazilian-themed operas with Italian librettos, such as Il Guarany . Opera in Argentina developed in the 20th century after the inauguration of Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires—with the opera Aurora , by Ettore Panizza , being heavily influenced by the Italian tradition, due to immigration. Other important composers from Argentina include Felipe Boero and Alberto Ginastera . Perhaps
4104-576: Is most famous for his Italian comic operas , especially The Marriage of Figaro ( Le nozze di Figaro ), Don Giovanni , and Così fan tutte , as well as Die Entführung aus dem Serail ( The Abduction from the Seraglio ), and The Magic Flute ( Die Zauberflöte ), landmarks in the German tradition. The first third of the 19th century saw the high point of the bel canto style, with Gioachino Rossini , Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini all creating signature works of that style. It also saw
4256-487: Is the first opera score to have survived until the present day. However, the honour of being the first opera still to be regularly performed goes to Claudio Monteverdi 's L'Orfeo , composed for the court of Mantua in 1607. The Mantua court of the Gonzagas , employers of Monteverdi, played a significant role in the origin of opera employing not only court singers of the concerto delle donne (till 1598), but also one of
4408-830: Is the shift away from long, suspended melodies, to short quick mottos, as first illustrated by Giuseppe Verdi in his Falstaff . Composers such as Strauss, Britten, Shostakovich and Stravinsky adopted and expanded upon this style. Operatic modernism truly began in the operas of two Viennese composers, Arnold Schoenberg and his student 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 glückliche Hand display heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance in general. Schoenberg also occasionally used Sprechstimme . The two operas of Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg, Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (incomplete at his death in 1935) share many of
4560-539: Is widely regarded as a masterpiece and is one of the key works in the German repertoire. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the vast cultural movement known as Romanticism began to exert an influence over German composers. The Romantics showed a keen interest in the Middle Ages as well as German folklore. The fairy tale collections of the Brothers Grimm and the rediscovered Medieval German epic
4712-568: The Nibelungenlied were major sources of inspiration for the movement. There was also often a quest for a distinctively German identity, influenced by the new nationalism which had arisen in the wake of the Napoleonic invasions. Romanticism was already firmly established in German literature with writers such as Tieck , Novalis , Eichendorff and Clemens Brentano . One of the most famous German Romantic authors, E. T. A. Hoffmann ,
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4864-614: 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. Another important development was the founding of the Theater am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg in 1678, aimed at the local middle classes who preferred opera in their own language. The new opera house opened with
5016-422: The Brothers Grimm for inspiration. Yet, though Hänsel is often viewed as the ideal piece for introducing opera to children, it also has extraordinarily sophisticated orchestration and makes great use of leitmotifs, both tell-tale signs of Wagner's influence. Other composers of the era who tried their hand at opera include Hugo Wolf ( Der Corregidor , 1896) and Wagner's own son Siegfried . Richard Strauss
5168-530: The English Restoration , foreign (especially French) musicians were welcomed back. In 1673, Thomas Shadwell 's Psyche , patterned on the 1671 'comédie-ballet' of the same name produced by Molière and Jean-Baptiste Lully . William Davenant produced The Tempest in the same year, which was the first musical adaption of a Shakespeare play (composed by Locke and Johnson). About 1683, John Blow composed Venus and Adonis , often thought of as
5320-561: The Magic Flute pointed the way forward for future German opera, especially according to later commentators. The greatest German composer of the next generation, Beethoven , seized on The Magic Flute' s blend of domestic comedy and high seriousness for his only opera, Fidelio , the story of a devoted wife who saves her husband from political imprisonment. The years following the French Revolution of 1789 had been some of
5472-771: The Oper am Brühl in Leipzig and the Opernhaus vorm Salztor in Naumburg in 1701. Both played during the trade fairs in the towns, presenting both German and Italian opera, and a combination of both. While the house in Leipzig was financed by the town of Leipzig, the house in Naumburg was initiated and supported by the ruler, Moritz Wilhelm, Duke of Saxe-Zeitz , but offered public performances. The other leading German composers of
5624-599: The Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass . Spain also produced its own distinctive form of opera, known as zarzuela , which had two separate flowerings: one from the mid-17th century through the mid-18th century, and another beginning around 1850. During the late 18th century up until the mid-19th century, Italian opera was immensely popular in Spain, supplanting the native form . In Russian Eastern Europe, several national operas began to emerge. Ukrainian opera
5776-577: The dramatist Sir William Davenant produced The Siege of Rhodes . Since his theatre was not licensed to produce drama, he asked several of the leading composers ( Lawes , Cooke , Locke , Coleman and Hudson ) to set sections of it to music. This success was followed by The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659). These pieces were encouraged by Oliver Cromwell because they were critical of Spain. With
5928-462: 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 emphasize the inflections of speech, and aria (an "air" or formal song) in which
6080-471: 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 the Arcadian Academy , which came to be associated with the poet Metastasio , whose libretti helped crystallize
6232-451: The 17th century. In the 18th century, Italian opera continued to dominate most of Europe (except France), attracting foreign composers such as George Frideric Handel . Opera seria was the most prestigious form of Italian opera, until Christoph Willibald Gluck reacted against its artificiality with his "reform" operas in the 1760s. The most renowned figure of late 18th-century opera is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , who began with opera seria but
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6384-557: 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 and Napoleonic period, composers such as Étienne Méhul , Luigi Cherubini and Gaspare Spontini , who were followers of Gluck, brought
6536-590: The 1920s, including Hindemith's Neues vom Tage . Now Hindemith responded to the advent of the Third Reich with his chief work Mathis der Maler , a portrait of an artist trying to survive in hostile times. It received its premiere in Zürich in 1938, since all performances of Hindemith's music had been banned in Germany the previous year. In 1940, Hindemith left Switzerland for the United States, joining
6688-464: 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
6840-562: The 20th century for his innovative works. His later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera Jenůfa , which was premiered in 1904 in Brno . The success of Jenůfa (often called the " Moravian national opera") at Prague in 1916 gave Janáček access to the world's great opera stages. Janáček's later works are his most celebrated. They include operas such as Káťa Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen ,
6992-547: The 20th century, English opera began to assert more independence, with works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and in particular Benjamin Britten , who in a series of works that remain in standard repertory today, revealed an excellent flair for the dramatic and superb musicality. More recently Sir Harrison Birtwistle has emerged as one of Britain's most significant contemporary composers from his first opera Punch and Judy to his most recent critical success in The Minotaur . In
7144-609: 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
7296-527: The Baroque period, Italian opera never gained much of a foothold in France, where its own national operatic tradition was more popular instead. After Rameau's death, the Bohemian-Austrian composer 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
7448-586: The Beach ), Mark Adamo , John Corigliano ( The Ghosts of Versailles ), Robert Moran , John Adams ( Nixon in China ), André Previn and Jake Heggie . Many contemporary 21st century opera composers have emerged such as Missy Mazzoli , Kevin Puts , Tom Cipullo , Huang Ruo , David T. Little , Terence Blanchard , Jennifer Higdon , Tobias Picker , Michael Ching , Anthony Davis , and Ricky Ian Gordon . Opera
7600-718: The Czech national spirit, as were some of his choral works. By far the most successful of the operas is Rusalka which contains the well-known aria "Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém" ("Song to the Moon"); it is played on contemporary opera stages frequently outside the Czech Republic . This is attributable to their uneven invention and libretti, and perhaps also their staging requirements – The Jacobin , Armida , Vanda and Dimitrij need stages large enough to portray invading armies. Leoš Janáček gained international recognition in
7752-515: The Great in Berlin, as did Carl Heinrich Graun . The king himself supplied the libretto for Graun's Montezuma , first performed in 1755. Deprived of aristocratic patronage until the mid-1770s, opera in German was forced to look to the general public to survive. This meant theatrical companies had to tour from town to town. The Singspiel became the most popular form of German opera, especially in
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#17327797750067904-457: The Hamburg style was its eclecticism. Orpheus (1726) by Telemann contains arias in Italian setting texts taken from famous Handel operas as well as choruses in French to words originally set by Lully. Hamburg opera might also include comic characters (Keiser's Der Carneval von Venedig of 1707 has them speaking in the local Lower Saxon dialect), marking a great contrast to the elevated new style of opera seria as defined by Metastasio . Yet
8056-771: The London stage from the mid-19th century into the 1870s. London's Daily Telegraph agreed, describing The Yeomen of the Guard as "a genuine English opera, forerunner of many others, let us hope, and possibly significant of an advance towards a national lyric stage". Sullivan produced a few light operas in the 1890s that were of a more serious nature than those in the G&;S series, including Haddon Hall and The Beauty Stone , but Ivanhoe (which ran for 155 consecutive performances, using alternating casts—a record until Broadway's La bohème ) survives as his only grand opera . In
8208-557: 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. In 1765 Melchior Grimm published " Poème lyrique ", an influential article for the Encyclopédie on lyric and opera librettos . Several composers of
8360-651: The absolute limits. Now a new group of composers appeared in Vienna who wanted to take music beyond. Operatic modernism truly began in the operas of two composers of the so-called Second Viennese School , Arnold Schoenberg and his acolyte Alban Berg , both 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 glückliche 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
8512-551: The acts of stage plays, operas in the new comic genre of intermezzi , which developed largely in Naples in the 1710s and 1720s, were initially staged during the intermissions of opera seria. They became so popular, however, that they were soon being offered as separate productions. 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
8664-485: The advent of grand opera typified by the works of Daniel Auber and Giacomo Meyerbeer as well as Carl Maria von Weber 's introduction of German Romantische Oper (German Romantic Opera). The mid-to-late 19th century was a golden age of opera, led and dominated by Giuseppe Verdi in Italy and Richard Wagner in Germany. The popularity of opera continued through the verismo era in Italy and contemporary French opera through to Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss in
8816-457: The art form back to life again. 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. Examples of famous operas in
8968-445: The avant-garde, Mediterranean and Germanic culture in his music. He never lived to finish his most significant opera Doktor Faust (1925). Paul Hindemith began his operatic career with short, scandalous pieces such as Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen ("Murder, Hope of Women") before turning to Bach, as Busoni had done. Hindemith saw Bach-inspired "neo-classicism" as a way of curbing the excesses of late Romanticism. Cardillac (1925)
9120-411: The bel canto style include Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola , as well as Bellini's Norma , La sonnambula and I puritani and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor , L'elisir d'amore and Don Pasquale . Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly popularized by Giuseppe Verdi , beginning with his biblical opera Nabucco . This opera, and
9272-459: The characters express their emotions in a more structured melodic style. Vocal 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 . The terminology of
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#17327797750069424-410: The circle of opera fans. Since the invention of radio and television, operas were also performed on (and written for) these media. Beginning in 2006, a number of major opera houses began to present live high-definition video transmissions of their performances in cinemas all over the world. Since 2009, complete performances can be downloaded and are live streamed . The words of an opera are known as
9576-441: The development of German music, including Wagner's early works. Other notable operas of the time include Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849) by Otto Nicolai and Martha (1847) by Friedrich von Flotow . Later came Peter Cornelius ( Der Barbier von Bagdad , 1858), Hermann Goetz ( Der Widerspänstigen Zähmung , 1874) and Karl Goldmark ( Die Königin von Saba , 1875). Mention should be made of two great composers of
9728-453: The development of serious German opera. Weber completely eliminated spoken dialogue, producing a "through-composed" work where the distinction between recitative and aria is becoming blurred. Its lessons would not be lost on future composers, including Richard Wagner . Weber's most important successor in the field of Romantic opera was Heinrich Marschner , who further explored the Gothic and
9880-581: 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 leitmotifs ; 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
10032-408: The distinction between aria and recitative in favour of a seamless flow of "endless melody". 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 with part of the patronage from Ludwig II of Bavaria , exclusively dedicated to performing his own works in
10184-519: The dominance of Expressionism in the arts and the contemporary psychological explorations of Sigmund Freud . All three composers suffered persecution and eclipse under the Nazis , who condemned their works as entartete Musik ("degenerate music"). Hans Pfitzner was another late Romantic post-Wagnerian, albeit of a more conservative stripe. His major opera Palestrina (1917) makes the case for tradition and inspiration rather than musical modernism. In
10336-506: The drama is understated, enigmatic and completely un-Wagnerian. Other notable 20th-century names include Ravel , Dukas , Roussel , Honegger 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. In England, opera's antecedent
10488-577: The early 20th century. During the 19th century, parallel operatic traditions emerged in central and eastern Europe, particularly in Russia and Bohemia . The 20th century saw many experiments with modern styles, such as atonality and serialism ( Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg ), neoclassicism ( Igor Stravinsky ), and minimalism ( Philip Glass and John Adams ). With the rise of recording technology , singers such as Enrico Caruso and Maria Callas became known to much wider audiences that went beyond
10640-427: The emergence of the separate but closely related art of musical theatre in the late 19th century. Sullivan wrote only one grand opera, Ivanhoe (following the efforts of a number of young English composers beginning about 1876), but he claimed that even his light operas constituted part of a school of "English" opera, intended to supplant the French operettas (usually performed in bad translations) that had dominated
10792-652: The end of the decade, German opera could be heard throughout Central Europe owing in part to travelling theatres and German states that began supporting Nationaltheater that further developed the repertoire, such as those founded in Mannheim and Vienna. Alongside those already mentioned above, notable composers of German-language opera from the 1770s and 1780s include Johann André , Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf , Christian Gottlob Neefe , Ignaz Umlauf , and Ernst Wilhelm Wolf . With successful works that appeared on stages across Germany, like Der Doktor und Apotheker , Ditters
10944-642: The era who wrote their major works in other genres yet also composed operas: Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann . Schubert wrote over a dozen operas, mostly in the Singspiel style. Hardly any were performed during the composer's lifetime. Schumann only wrote one opera, Genoveva , first staged in Leipzig in 1850. Though praised by Liszt , it failed to win lasting success. The verdict on both these composer's operas has generally been that, though they contain excellent music, they have too many dramatic weaknesses to be acclaimed as great stage works. Richard Wagner
11096-474: The example of Schoenberg and Berg who had pioneered modernist techniques such as atonality and serialism in the earlier decades of the century. Composers at work in the field of opera today include Hans Werner Henze . As the names of Mozart, Weber, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Berg indicate, Germany and Austria have one of the strongest operatic traditions in European culture. This is also evidenced by
11248-529: The first actual "opera singers", Madama Europa . Opera did not remain confined to court audiences for long. In 1637, the idea of a "season" (often during the 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
11400-672: The first decade of the 21st century, the librettist of an early Birtwistle opera, Michael Nyman , has been focusing on composing operas, including Facing Goya , Man and Boy: Dada , and Love Counts . Today composers such as Thomas Adès continue to export English opera abroad. Also in the 20th century, American composers like George Gershwin ( Porgy and Bess ), Scott Joplin ( Treemonisha ), Leonard Bernstein ( Candide ), Gian Carlo Menotti , Douglas Moore , and Carlisle Floyd began to contribute English-language operas infused with touches of popular musical styles. They were followed by composers such as Philip Glass ( Einstein on
11552-501: 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
11704-469: The first important operetta in the German language, but by far the most famous example of the genre is Die Fledermaus (1874) by Johann Strauss . Franz Lehár 's The Merry Widow (1905) and Emmerich Kálmán 's Die Csárdásfürstin (1915) were other massive hits. Other composers who worked in this style include Oscar Straus and Sigmund Romberg . Following the example of Wagner, Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky and Schreker had pushed traditional tonality to
11856-420: The first serious German opera. It was also in the 1770s that composers, like Georg Benda , began experimenting with melodrama , a type of music theatre which some commentators saw as a viable alternative to opera. Early melodramas that proved popular with theatre troupes throughout German-speaking Europe included Benda's Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea (both premiered in 1775). Other important contributions to
12008-461: The first true English-language opera. Blow's immediate successor was the better known Henry Purcell . Despite the success of his masterwork Dido and Aeneas (1689), 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
12160-431: The form and style that would dominate opera throughout the twentieth century. Rather than long, suspended melodies, Falstaff contains many little motifs and mottos, that, rather than being expanded upon, are introduced and subsequently dropped, only to be brought up again later. These motifs never are expanded upon, and just as the audience expects a character to launch into a long melody, a new character speaks, introducing
12312-541: 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 . Before such elements were forced out of opera seria, many libretti had featured a separately unfolding comic plot as sort of an "opera-within-an-opera". One reason for this
12464-452: The golden age of opera seria the singer really became the star. The role of the hero was usually written for the high-pitched male castrato voice, which was produced by castration of the singer before puberty , which prevented a boy's larynx from being transformed at puberty. 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
12616-410: 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. These final two works showed Verdi at his most masterfully orchestrated, and are both incredibly influential, and modern. In Falstaff , Verdi sets the pre-eminent standard for
12768-625: 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 Rachmaninoff in his works The Miserly Knight and Francesca 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
12920-636: The hands of the composer Johann Adam Hiller . Hiller's 1766 reworking of the Singspiel Die verwandelten Weiber was a landmark in the history of the genre, although his most famous work would be Die Jagd (1770). These Singspiele were comedies mixing spoken dialogue and singing, influenced by the similar genres of the ballad opera in England and the opéra comique in France. Often having sentimental plots and extremely simple music, Singspiele were no match for contemporary opera serias in artistic sophistication. The 1770s marked an important decade in
13072-456: The hero Max makes his deal with the Devil. Der Freischütz was immensely popular, not only in Germany, but throughout Europe. Weber never really achieved his full potential as an opera composer due to his early death from tuberculosis and his poor choice of libretti. His major German opera after Der Freischütz , Euryanthe (1823), suffers from a particularly weak text and is rarely staged nowadays. Yet Euryanthe marks another important stage in
13224-528: The history of German-language opera. The theatre company of Abel Seyler pioneered serious German-language opera, and Seyler commissioned operas by Hiller, Georg Benda , Anton Schweitzer and other composers. A milestone of German opera was Anton Schweitzer 's Alceste , with a libretto by Wieland and commissioned by Seyler, which premiered in 1773 in Weimar . Alceste was called "a model for German opera" by Ernst Christoph Dressler and has been described as
13376-471: The immediate future belonged to Italian opera. The most famous German-born opera composer of the era, Handel, wrote four operas for Hamburg at the beginning of his career but soon moved on to write opera seria in Italy and England. In 1738, the Theater am Gänsemarkt went bankrupt and the fortunes of serious opera in German went into decline for the next few decades. Other early opera houses in Germany included
13528-525: The indicated intervals, and everything being bound together with the time and rhythm of the music except where a pause is indicated". Schoenberg intended Moses und Aron as his operatic masterpiece, but it was left unfinished at his death. The two operas of Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg, Wozzeck and Lulu (left incomplete at his death) share many of the same characteristics described above, though Berg combined his highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique with melodic passages of
13680-452: The internationally popular The Bartered Bride . Smetana's eight operas created the bedrock of the Czech opera repertory, but of these only The Bartered Bride is performed regularly outside the composer's homeland. After reaching Vienna in 1892 and London in 1895 it rapidly became part of the repertory of every major opera company worldwide. Antonín Dvořák 's nine operas, except his first, have librettos in Czech and were intended to convey
13832-552: The large number of opera houses, particularly in Germany where almost every major city has its own theatre for staging such works, as well as internationally renowned operatic events such as the Salzburg Festival . 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
13984-417: The late 18th century. Nevertheless, native forms would develop in spite of this influence. In 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the first Singspiel , Seelewig , a popular form of German-language opera in which singing alternates with spoken dialogue. In the late 17th century and early 18th century, the Theater am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg presented German operas by Keiser , Telemann and Handel . Yet most of
14136-420: The late nineteenth century, a new, lighter form of opera, operetta , became popular in Vienna . Operettas had immediately attractive tunes, comic (and often frivolous) plots and used spoken dialogue between the musical "numbers". Viennese operetta was inspired by the fashion for the French operettas of Jacques Offenbach . Das Pensionat [ de ] (1860) by Franz von Suppé is generally regarded as
14288-609: The leadership Zacharia Paliashvili , who fused local folk songs and stories with 19th-century Romantic classical themes. 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 . Stanisław Moniuszko 's opera Straszny Dwór (in English The Haunted Manor ) (1861–64) represents
14440-438: 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. In contrast to Italian opera, which was generally composed for the aristocratic class, German opera was generally composed for the masses and tended to feature simple folk-like melodies, and it was not until the arrival of Mozart that German opera
14592-499: The most daring and revolutionary. In it, Verdi blurs the distinction between the aria and recitative as it never before was, leading the opera to be "an unending string of duets". La traviata was also novel. It tells the story of courtesan, and it includes elements of verismo or "realistic" opera, because rather than featuring great kings and figures from literature, it focuses on the tragedies of ordinary life and society. After these, he continued to develop his style, composing perhaps
14744-542: 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 Richard Wagner , and in particular the Tristan chord . Composers such as Richard Strauss , Claude Debussy , Giacomo Puccini , Paul Hindemith , Benjamin Britten and Hans Pfitzner pushed Wagnerian harmony further with a more extreme use of chromaticism and greater use of dissonance. Another aspect of modernist opera
14896-414: The most popular of all opéra comiques. Jules Massenet , Camille Saint-Saëns and Léo Delibes all composed works which are still part of the standard repertory, examples being Massenet's Manon , Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila and Delibes' Lakmé . Their operas formed another genre, the opéra lyrique , combined opéra comique and grand opera. It is less grandiose than grand opera, but without
15048-417: The most significant figure was undoubtedly Wagner . 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. He greatly increased the role and power of the orchestra, creating scores with
15200-434: The most turbulent in European history. In Fidelio , Beethoven wanted to express the ideals of that Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. He was also inspired by contemporary French works, particularly the rescue operas of Luigi Cherubini . Beethoven was arguably not a natural composer of opera and, although Fidelio was premiered in 1805, it was not until 1814 that he produced its final version. Nevertheless, Fidelio
15352-458: The musical stage in England. The only exceptions were ballad operas , such as John Gay 's The Beggar's Opera (1728), musical burlesques , European operettas , and late Victorian era light operas , notably the Savoy operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan , all of which types of musical entertainments frequently spoofed operatic conventions; these genres contributed significantly to
15504-675: The mythological Die ägyptische Helena and Daphne . Strauss bid farewell to the musical stage with Capriccio of 1942, a "conversation piece" which explores the relationship between words and music in opera. Other composers styled "late Romantic", such as Franz Schreker ( Der ferne Klang , 1912; Der Schatzgräber , 1920), Alexander von Zemlinsky ( Eine florentinische Tragödie , 1917; Der Zwerg , 1922) and Erich Korngold ( Die tote Stadt , 1920) explored similar territory to Strauss's Salome and Elektra . They combined Wagnerian influences, lush orchestration, strange harmonies and dissonances with " decadent " subject matter reflecting
15656-482: 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 Adam . In this climate, the operas of the French-born composer Hector Berlioz struggled to gain
15808-534: The new regime as best they could. Composers writing after World War II had to find a way of coming to terms with the destruction caused by the Third Reich. The modernism of Schoenberg and Berg proved attractive to young composers, since their works had been banned by the Nazis and were free of any taint of the former regime. Bernd Alois Zimmermann looked to the example of Berg's Wozzeck for his only opera Die Soldaten (1965), and Aribert Reimann continued
15960-586: The ones that would follow in Verdi's career, revolutionized Italian opera, changing it from merely a display of vocal fireworks, with Rossini's and Donizetti's works, to dramatic story-telling. 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 for a unified Italy. In the early 1850s, Verdi produced his three most popular operas: Rigoletto , Il trovatore and La traviata . The first of these, Rigoletto , proved
16112-497: The opera, which would pave the way for Wagner's use of the leitmotif . The major breakthrough in the history of German Romantic opera was Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber , premiered in Berlin on 18 June 1821. Weber resented the Europe-wide dominance of the Italian operas of Rossini and wanted to establish a uniquely German style of opera. He turned to German folk songs and folklore for inspiration; Der Freischütz
16264-427: The operas of Mozart , who wrote in Vienna near the century's close. Leading Italian-born composers of opera seria include Alessandro Scarlatti , Antonio Vivaldi and Nicola Porpora . Opera seria had its weaknesses and critics. 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
16416-592: The orchestra. Wagner also drew on Germanic mythology in his huge operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen . After Wagner, opera could never be the same again, so great was his influence. The most successful of his followers was Richard Strauss . Opera flourished in German-speaking lands in the early 20th century in the hands of figures such as Hindemith , Busoni and Weill until Adolf Hitler 's seizure of power forced many composers into silence or exile. After World War II young opera writers were inspired by
16568-549: The other dominating force in English opera at this time was George Frideric Handel , whose opera serias filled the London operatic stages for decades and influenced most home-grown composers, like John Frederick Lampe , who wrote using Italian models. This situation continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including in the work of Michael William Balfe , and the operas of the great Italian composers, as well as those of Mozart, Beethoven, and Meyerbeer, continued to dominate
16720-463: The outskirts of the city. In 1791, Mozart set one of his libretti, The Magic Flute . Although it appeared in the context of other popular Viennese magic operas ( Zauberopern ), like Wenzel Müller 's Der Fagottist [ de ] , Mozart's proved to be no ordinary Singspiel . Though the traditional farcical elements remained, Mozart added a new seriousness, particularly in the music for Sarastro and his priests. Even more than Die Entführung ,
16872-572: The period, including Niccolò Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta , attempted to put these ideals into practice. The first to succeed however, was Gluck. Gluck strove to achieve a "beautiful simplicity". This is evident in his first reform opera, Orfeo ed Euridice , where his non-virtuosic vocal melodies are supported by simple harmonies and a richer orchestra 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
17024-511: The quintessential designer of these productions, and this style was to dominate the English stage for three centuries. These masques contained songs and dances. In Ben Jonson 's Lovers Made Men (1617), "the whole masque was sung after the Italian manner, stilo recitativo". The approach of the English Commonwealth closed theatres and halted any developments that may have led to the establishment of English opera. However, in 1656,
17176-607: 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. Il pomo d%27oro Il pomo d'oro ( The Golden Apple )
17328-568: The section on modernism . During the late 19th century, the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II , an admirer of the French -language operettas composed by Jacques Offenbach , composed several German-language operettas, the most famous of which was Die Fledermaus . Nevertheless, rather than copying the style of Offenbach, the operettas of Strauss II had distinctly Viennese flavor to them. In rivalry with imported Italian opera productions,
17480-419: The sense "composition in which poetry, dance, and music are combined" in 1639; the first recorded English usage in this sense dates to 1648. 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 de' Bardi ". Significantly, Dafne
17632-402: The seven days of the week, Licht (1977–2003). Giselher Klebe created an extensive body of work in the operatic genre based on literary works. Other leading composers still producing operas today include Wolfgang Rihm and Olga Neuwirth . Opera Opera is a form of Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers . Such
17784-614: The spoken dialogue of opèra comique . 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
17936-401: The stage in every country except France. Farinelli was one of the most famous singers of the 18th century. Italian opera set the Baroque standard. Italian libretti were the norm, even when a German composer like Handel found himself composing the likes of Rinaldo and Giulio Cesare for London audiences. Italian libretti remained dominant in the classical period as well, for example in
18088-525: The structure of a spoken play, such as Shakespeare in Purcell's The Fairy-Queen (1692) and Beaumont and Fletcher in The Prophetess (1690) and Bonduca (1696). 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 )
18240-593: 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, along with incorporating the new form introduced by Verdi. 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
18392-400: The style he wanted. Wagner's innovations cast an immense shadow over subsequent composers, who struggled to absorb his influence while retaining their own individuality. One of the most successful composers of the following generation was Humperdinck , whose Hänsel und Gretel (1893) still has an assured place in the standard repertoire. Humperdinck turned back to folk song and the tales of
18544-566: The supernatural in works such as Der Vampyr (1828) and Hans Heiling (1833). On the other hand, it was with comic opera that Albert Lortzing scored his biggest successes. The popularity of pieces such as Zar und Zimmermann continues in Germany today, though Lortzing's operas are rarely staged abroad. Though he began in Germany, Giacomo Meyerbeer was more famous for his contributions to Italian and (especially) French opera. He fused elements from all three national styles into his conception of grand opera , which had an important influence on
18696-442: The theatre principal Abel Seyler became an eager promoter of German opera in the 1770s, but it was only with the appearance of Mozart that a lasting tradition of serious German-language opera was established. Mozart took the simple, popular genre of Singspiel and turned it into something far more sophisticated. Beethoven followed his example with the idealistic Fidelio ; and with Der Freischütz of 1821, Weber established
18848-509: The theatre was immoral, but Keiser and fellow composers such as Johann Mattheson broadened the range of subject matter to include the historical and the mythological. Keiser drew on foreign operatic traditions, for instance he included dances after the model of the French tradition of Lully . The recitative in his operas was always in German so the audience could follow the plot, but from Claudius in 1703 he began to include arias in Italian which allowed for florid vocal display. The hallmark of
19000-520: The time tended to follow Handel's example. This was because the courts of the various German states favoured opera in Italian. In 1730 the chief proponent of opera seria, the Italian librettist Metastasio , took up residence as the imperial poet in Vienna. Johann Adolph Hasse wrote operas in Italian for the court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden . Hasse also wrote operas for the court of Frederick
19152-498: The tonal music system to its breaking point. The highly chromatic music featured harsh dissonances and unresolved harmonies. This, paired with the gruesome subject matter, looked forward to expressionism . Elektra also marked the beginning of Strauss's working relationship with the leading Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal , who would provide another five libretti for the composer. With Der Rosenkavalier of 1911, Strauss changed direction, looking towards Mozart and
19304-536: The tradition of expressionism with his Shakespearean Lear (1978). Perhaps the most versatile and internationally famous post-war German opera composer is Hans Werner Henze , who has produced a series of works which mix Bergian influences with those of Italian composers such as Verdi . Examples of his operas are Boulevard Solitude , The Bassarids (to a libretto by W. H. Auden ) and Das verratene Meer . Karlheinz Stockhausen set off in an even more avant-garde direction with his enormous operatic cycle based on
19456-534: The trend. The changing role of the orchestra in opera is described in more detail below . The Italian word opera means "work", both in the sense of the labour done and the result produced. The Italian word derives from the Latin word opera , a singular noun meaning "work" and also the plural of the noun opus . According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the Italian word was first used in
19608-453: The various kinds of operatic voices is described in detail below . During both the Baroque and Classical periods , recitative could appear in two basic forms, each of which was accompanied by a different instrumental ensemble: secco (dry) recitative, sung with a free rhythm dictated by the accent of the words, accompanied only by basso continuo , which was usually a harpsichord and
19760-600: The wedding of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I and Margaret Theresa of Spain in 1666, the production was rescheduled to mark the Empress's 17th birthday in 1668. The staging was unprecedented for its magnificence (and expense). The designer Ludovico Ottavio Burnacini provided no fewer than 24 sets and there were plenty of opportunities for spectacular stage machinery , including shipwrecks and collapsing towers. The opera tells
19912-475: The world of the Viennese waltz as much as towards Wagner. Modernist critics accused him of "selling out", but Rosenkavalier proved an immense success with audiences around the world. Strauss continued to ignore critical fashion, producing the mixture of farce and high tragedy of Ariadne auf Naxos , the complex allegory of Die Frau ohne Schatten , the domestic dramas of Intermezzo and Arabella , and
20064-399: The world's opera stages with such popular works as Giacomo Puccini 's La bohème , Tosca , and Madama Butterfly . Later Italian composers, such as Berio and Nono , have experimented with modernism . The first German opera was Dafne , composed by Heinrich Schütz in 1627, but the music score has not survived. Italian opera held a great sway over German-speaking countries until
20216-508: 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, during
20368-499: Was a particularly successful composer of German opera between the mid-1780s and mid-1790s. At the end of the 18th century, a composer who would permanently change the German operatic tradition would emerge: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart . The great figure of the early Classical period was Christoph Willibald Gluck but his pioneering reforms were directed at Italian and French opera, not the German repertoire. In 1778, Emperor Joseph II attempted to change this state of affairs by establishing
20520-428: Was able to match its Italian counterpart in musical sophistication. The theatre company of Abel Seyler pioneered serious German-language opera in the 1770s, marking a break with the previous simpler musical entertainment. 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
20672-449: Was able to move beyond the Italian influences and create his own unique and distinctly English voice. His modernized ballad opera, Love in a Village (1762), began a vogue for pastiche opera that lasted well into the 19th century. Charles Burney wrote that Arne introduced "a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English composers had either pillaged or imitated". Besides Arne,
20824-455: Was also a music theorist and a composer in his own right and in 1816 he produced an opera, Undine , in Berlin. Another important early Romantic opera was Faust by Louis Spohr (also 1816). Both Hoffmann and Spohr took the basic form of the Singspiel as their starting point but began to group the individual numbers into extended scenes. They also employed "reminiscence motifs", recurring musical themes associated with characters or concepts in
20976-409: Was an attempt to attract members of the growing merchant class, newly wealthy, but still not as cultured as the nobility, to the public opera houses . These separate plots were almost immediately resurrected in a separately developing tradition that partly derived from the commedia dell'arte , a long-flourishing improvisatory stage tradition of Italy. Just as intermedi had once been performed in between
21128-539: 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 , however, is lost. A later work by Peri, Euridice , dating from 1600,
21280-532: Was both a scandal and an immense box-office success. Adolf Hitler 's assumption of power destroyed this thriving operatic scene. Ironically, after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, the German seat of the government was moved to the Kroll Opera House , the state opera house in Berlin which, under the adventurous directorship of Otto Klemperer , had seen the premieres of many innovative works of
21432-660: 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 of Ukrainian origin like Maxim Berezovsky and Dmitry Bortniansky were sent abroad to learn to write operas. The first opera written in Russian
21584-526: Was developed by Semen Hulak-Artemovsky (1813–1873) whose most famous work Zaporozhets za Dunayem (A Cossack Beyond the Danube) is regularly performed around the world. Other Ukrainian opera composers include Mykola Lysenko ( Taras Bulba and Natalka Poltavka ), Heorhiy Maiboroda , and Yuliy Meitus . At the turn of the century, a distinct national opera movement also began to emerge in Georgia under
21736-416: Was developed in the 19th century by Beethoven with his Fidelio (1805), 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 a supernatural atmosphere. Other opera composers of the time include Marschner , Schubert and Lortzing , but
21888-756: Was fully staged in 1945 in Armenia. The first years of the Soviet Union saw the emergence of new national operas, such as the Koroğlu (1937) by the Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov . The first Kyrgyz opera, Ai-Churek , premiered in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre on 26 May 1939, during Kyrgyz Art Decade. It was composed by Vladimir Vlasov , Abdylas Maldybaev and Vladimir Fere . The libretto
22040-529: Was heavily influenced by Wagner, despite his father 's efforts to the contrary. By seventeen, he was unimpressed with Tannhäuser , Lohengrin and Siegfried but absolutely entranced by the other three pieces of the Ring and Tristan und Isolde . Although in his early years he was more famous for his orchestral tone poems, Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) quickly established his reputation as Germany's leading opera composer. These two operas stretched
22192-469: Was his first work in this vein. Hindemith was also interested in putting contemporary life on the stage in his operas (a concept called Zeitoper ), as was Ernst Krenek whose Jonny spielt auf (1927) has a jazz violinist as its hero. Kurt Weill reflected life in Weimar Germany in a more overtly political way. His most famous collaboration with Bertolt Brecht , The Threepenny Opera (1928),
22344-473: Was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history and his innovations changed the course of opera, not just in Germany and Austria but throughout Europe. Wagner gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a "complete work of art"), a fusion of music, poetry and painting. His earliest experiments followed the examples set by Weber ( Die Feen ) and Meyerbeer ( Rienzi ), but his most important formative influence
22496-486: Was probably the symphonic music of Beethoven . Wagner believed his career truly began with Der fliegende Holländer (1843). Together with the two works which followed, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin , this has been described as the "zenith of German Romantic opera". Yet these were merely a prelude to even more radical developments. In his mature dramas, Tristan und Isolde , Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal , Wagner abolished
22648-535: Was the 17th-century jig . This was an afterpiece that came at the end of a play. It was frequently libellous and scandalous and consisted in the main of dialogue set to music arranged from popular tunes. In this respect, jigs anticipate the ballad operas of the 18th century. At the same time, the French masque was gaining a firm hold at the English Court, with even more lavish splendour and highly realistic scenery than had been seen before. Inigo Jones became
22800-418: Was the first English composer to experiment with Italian-style all-sung comic opera, with his greatest success being Thomas and Sally in 1760. His opera Artaxerxes (1762) was the first attempt to set a full-blown opera seria in English and was a huge success, holding the stage until the 1830s. Although Arne imitated many elements of Italian opera, he was perhaps the only English composer at that time who
22952-415: Was to establish serious opera in England, but these hopes ended with Purcell's early death at the age of 36. Following Purcell, the popularity of opera in England dwindled for several decades. A revived interest in opera occurred in the 1730s which is largely attributed to Thomas Arne , both for his own compositions and for alerting Handel to the commercial possibilities of large-scale works in English. Arne
23104-549: Was written by Joomart Bokonbaev, Jusup Turusbekov, and Kybanychbek Malikov. The opera is based on the Kyrgyz heroic epic Manas . In Iran, opera gained more attention after the introduction of Western classical music in the late 19th century. However, it took until mid 20th century for Iranian composers to start experiencing with the field, especially as the construction of the Roudaki Hall in 1967, made possible staging of
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