Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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PaperclipPerfector
7d ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
In a tangent of a reply over the in the Culture War thread I pointed out that in the States, the poor don't fund opera on behalf of the rich in any significant way, (because the poor don't really pay net taxes) and opera funding here, unlike in Europe, doesn't significantly come from the government. There's now a pretty even split between ticket revenue and philanthropy, so a better rephrase of the relationship I was critiquing is that the very, very rich pick up half the tab for middle and upper-middle class Americans to go see opera. I also added that as a Conservative, for me, this philanthropy is a double-edged sword. It keeps live opera going in America. But also, there is a predicable set of politics that tend to accompany MFA holders, who are put in charge of awarding grants and commissions to MFA holders, so MFA holders are writing operas for MFA holders, and as a result opera becomes even less of a popular living art form, and as a living art form gets trapped in an artistic ghetto. I noted that whatever friends and acquaintances I've successfully evangelized have taken an interest in exposure to famous pieces from the past, and not anything from an opera written by a living composer. I'd mentioned Puccini's Nessun Dorma aria from Turandot, and Donizetti's Cheti Cheti/Aspetta duet from Don Pasquale, as examples of beautiful & melodic, or comedically-fun & melodic examples that today's audiences still love, but would be seen as gauche by the MFA holders awarding grants and commissions.
@VoxelVexillologist asked if I could provide links to pieces like the latter as entry points for someone new to opera, and @KingOfTheBailey seconded and asked for a top-level post. The Friday fun thread seems a good place. Here was my reply to Voxel:
I'll start with the two pieces already mentioned.
A quick setup for what is going on in Nessun Dorma. There is a beautiful princess (Turandot) and the king, her father, does not have a male heir; whoever marries her gets a gorgeous wife and a kingdom. The princess does not want to get married, and especially not to a foreigner because of some past trauma in her family line. So, whomever asks for her hand has to successfully answer a series of riddles. If they succeed: gorgeous wife and a kingdom. If they fail: decapitation. A young unknown prince is travelling, incognito, through this kingdom. He sees the decapitated heads of failed suitors perched atop spikes on the outside of the city walls. But then he sees the princess, and falls head over heels. He successfully answers the riddles, and the princess is distraught at the prospect of actually getting married. So moved by love, he gives the princess a riddle. If she can guess his name by sunrise, he gets decapitated, but if not, she has to willingly(!) marry him. The princess charges all her servants with discovering the prince's name before sunrise, on penalty of death for failing to do so.
In Nessun Dorma (No One Sleeps), we hear both the prince's aria, giving his internal monologue, and in the background the chorus of the princess' servants. Some info on the composition of operas. Almost all begin with a libretto, a kind of poem, to which the composer then sets the music. The supermajority of operas have a different librettist and composer. The composer has great if not total license as to which lines and words within the libretto to emphasize and to repeat. The prince wills the night stars to set. And, when Puccini composed this aria, it was his choice to repeat the last word, thrice, to shape it -- victory... victory... victory!
This is an excellent live recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and you can use the closed caption option in YouTube to get English subtitles in case you aren't fluent in Italian. I think sports are a helpful comparison when discussing opera singers. There are different kinds of forwards in soccer, quarterbacks in football, etc. And, there are different kinds of basses, baritones, tenors, altos and sopranos. Roles are written for certain subtypes. Pavarotti is a great fit for this particular part because he is both more than a credible lyric and spinto tenor; he's capable of the warmth needed for most of the aria and as a huge-chested man, the power to drive its finale.
Setup for the duet I mentioned: Don Pasquale is a comic opera and if you like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan this should feel familiar and fun. Pasquale, himself, is the buffoon of the opera, and he's taken a young wife far too pretty for him, and after forbidding his nephew, who is his ward, to marry her even though the latter pair are in love. He is (rightly) suspicious she's still in love with his nephew, and he enlists Dr. Malatesta to help him try and catch the two out. Unbeknownst to Pasquale, Malatesta is on the side of the young lovers, and the small plot he proposes is a setup within a larger plot. Donizetti wrote a duet between Pasquale and Malatesta where both switch between addressing each other and making asides to the audience as the tempo keeps accelerating, ending with both talking over and past one another at breakneck speed.
This is a favorite comic opera of mine but not as famous as many so the recordings on YouTube are a bit limited in terms of quality. Here is one that I quite like, by Hampson and Pisaroni who have great comedic chemistry with one another.
There's a lot appealing about opera if you geek out about it. There's history in it: Verdi's Nabucco, to avoid censorship, smuggled a call for a unified Italian nation state within a biblical story, and Va Pensiero was the unification movement's unofficial anthem. Wagner drew inspiration from the same Nordic myths that Tolkien did, and his works are so dense with symbolism he's been claimed by all different types. Obviously the Reich's interest was horrid, and Wagner was certainly antisemitic, but as an example, prior to WW2, he was a darling of the Marxists (clearly Gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods, was about the death of nobility and feudalism, only to be replaced by capitalism, and Das Rheingold, a symbol of capital itself that allows the industrialist Alberich to oppress the proletariat, Nibelungen).
And there's also at the highest levels stunning virtuosity. Mozart wrote his Queen of the Night Aria for his sister-in-law who was a virtuosic soprano. When testing the upper limits of a singer's vocal rage, taking small steps up to the highest pitch makes hitting those highest notes much, much easier. So, Mozart arpeggiates the approach when he writes this aria, making it brutally difficult to sing. If you see it somewhere other than at one of the major opera houses, there is serious tension in the audience, as everyone waits to see if the soprano singing it will hit her high F in tune. On the other end of things, here is a professional opera singer turned vocal coach breaking down how a truly elite soprano deals with signing the role.
The closest I get to this world is the Manowar cover of Nessun Dorma and I never knew what it meant, so thank you very much for writing all of this out. (For Manowar, a man sitting up at night, having put it all on the line, and ending in a cry of victory is actually really thematically appropriate. It was also apparently recorded as a tribute to the singer's late mother but was sometimes performed live for the band's Italian fans.)
I don't know if opera is for me, but I certainly respect the hell out of the performances in it. How much of this is comprehensible if you just turn up to a performance, or is it one of those things where everyone already knows the pieces and the stories?
P.S.: I actually meant I thought this would be a great fit for a standalone thread; the stories from the wider world are IMHO the best part of this forum.
Accessibility might be a topic onto itself, as opera is a 400-year-old art form. Diving in:
Musically, some eras and composers tend to feature catchier melodies and simpler stories: Classical (late 1700s/early 1800s) and Verismo (late 1800s/early 1900s) are good bets; Mozart, Puccini, Donizetti, Verdi, Rossini, Bizet, etc. These are still the big box office draws for opera companies, and that's not coincidence.
Almost every opera company in America, for non-English language operas at minimum if not all productions, is going to project English-translation supertitles above the stage. The technology is within the financial means of even college fine arts programs, and regional & summer festival companies all have them. Here is an example of the supertitle screen hung above stage.
Fathom Events does live broadcasts of America's largest and only reparatory company, the Met, to movie theaters around the country, and uses subtitles. This is an easy, affordable option to see top talent perform, and if not in person, to do so on a big screen with a commercial-grade sound system. Roll up in shorts and a t-shirt, house a bucket of popcorn and a large soda, and the bathroom lines at intermission will be short. The Met also has its own online streaming service, Met Opera on Demand, and there is also Medici.tv for a collection of European companies. Both offer live broadcasts and large archives of operas. The Met's upcoming broadcasts of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville would be good first operas, if you wanted to hit up a movie theater or try out a free 7-day trial of Met Opera on Demand at home.
It is best to have some idea of the major plot points before going to see an opera, so you can focus on the music, singing and acting. Use the supertitles or subtitles as mile markers (I still do). Lean on the supertitles or subtitles during the recitative/singspiel/dialogue that advances the plot, and have loaded in your memory the gist of great arias and duets so that you can focus in on the performances.
There are tons of free resources to get up to speed on any opera you're seeing. The easiest is often the website of whatever opera company you're going to see. In spite of accusations of snobbishness, opera companies want you to like opera! They want you to feel comfortable and informed, and to keep coming back and buying tickets. Here is the Met's page for their upcoming production of the Barber of Seville. It's a nice overview of the history of the opera, the context in which it was composed, points out the musical highlights, and offers a link to a concise synopsis of the plot. Reviewing this, alone, should give you enough info, in combination with the supertitles or subtitles, to follow along and enjoy the opera. And, again, with the companies themselves, here’s a five minute video by the ROH offering a primer on the Magic Flute posted to YouTube ahead of one of its productions.
It ended it 2016, but Houston Public Media's archive of the Opera Cheat Sheet podcast is a great resource. Find the 20 minute episode for whatever opera you're seeing and get a concise summary and background from two afficionados.
And if you want to nerd out a bit more and read some history, critical essays and the full libretto for an opera you're going to see without hunting down those pieces individually, the English National Opera Guides, a series of 50-some short books, each on a famous opera, has been a go-to for me for years.
And as a Conservative, it can be a bit woke and identitarian in places for my taste, but there is still a lot of value in the Met's Aria Code podcast, which takes deep dives into famous arias. If you can line up the relevant episode with an opera you're seeing, it's worth a listen.
The above is what I would start with to get my feet wet. Then, if the bug bites you, you can dig in to denser works. Part of the nerdy fun, for me, is reading up on the historical context in which operas were composed, and diving into the themes of denser works, etc.
Edit: Oh! And! Opera companies have a financial interest in getting young people interested in opera. If there's an opera company near you, they likely offer discounted tickets for young professionals. And, in the opera world, young professional could mean people under the age of 30, 35, 40 or even 45 years of age.
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