What Is Opera? Drama Sung From Beginning to End

The Florentine experiment might have stayed a curiosity had not Claudio Monteverdi, court composer at Mantua, taken it up. His Orfeo of 1607, on the myth of the singer who goes to the underworld, is the first opera still performed, and in it the ingredients are already present: a story told in sung speech, recitative, that moves the plot along, interrupted by arias, songs in which a character stops to feel something, with an orchestra that comments and a chorus that reacts. Venice opened the first public opera house in 1637, and the form became a business, with paying audiences, star singers, and composers writing a new work for every season. By 1700 opera was Italian wherever it was performed, and the castrati, boys castrated before puberty to keep their high voices, who were its greatest stars, sang the heroes.

An opera is built from a few kinds of number, and the balance between them is the history of the form:

• •Recitative: sung dialogue, close to speech, in which the story is told; accompanied by harpsichord and cello in the eighteenth century and by the orchestra later
• •Aria: a solo song in which time stops and a character reflects, the showpiece for the singer and the reason people came
• •Ensembles: duets, trios and larger pieces in which several characters sing different words and feelings at once, which no play can do and which Mozart perfected
• •Chorus: the crowd, the soldiers, the villagers, commenting or taking part
• •Overture and interludes: the orchestra alone, setting the scene or filling a scene change
• •The libretto: the text, written by a poet, which composers have alternately served and ignored

Opera singers are classified by range and weight, soprano, mezzo, contralto for women and tenor, baritone, bass for men, with subdivisions for lightness, agility and power, and each type has its roles: the soprano heroine, the tenor lover, the baritone rival or father, the bass king or villain. The technique exists to be heard over an orchestra of eighty in a hall of two thousand without amplification, and it works by tuning the resonances of the throat and mouth to produce a ring at around 3,000 hertz, the singer's formant, at frequencies where the orchestra is weak and the ear is sensitive. It takes ten years to build and it is why an operatic voice sounds nothing like a pop singer's, whose microphone does the work. The castrati vanished in the nineteenth century, their roles now sung by women or countertenors, men singing in falsetto with a training that has revived the Baroque repertoire.

Mozart in the 1780s made opera about people rather than gods, with The Marriage of Figaro turning a comedy of servants outwitting a count into a study of forgiveness, and Don Giovanni mixing farce and damnation. The nineteenth century was opera's peak as popular art. Rossini's tunes were whistled in the street, Verdi's choruses became the anthems of Italian unification and his Rigoletto, La Traviata and Aida hold the stage everywhere, and Wagner rebuilt the form from the orchestra up, dissolving the numbers into continuous music, weaving the score from recurring motifs, and writing the sixteen-hour Ring cycle for a theatre he designed at Bayreuth with the orchestra hidden. Puccini at the century's end wrote La Boheme, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, the operas most likely to make a first-time audience cry, and the tradition of the sung tragedy that Florence had tried to revive was fully realised three hundred years late.

The twentieth century made opera harder and stranger, with Berg's Wozzeck and Britten's Peter Grimes putting outcasts at the centre and composers from Janacek to Adams finding new subjects in Czech villages and presidential visits to China; it also made it more expensive, since a production now costs what a film does and the audience is smaller. The response has been cinema relays, surtitles, which since the 1980s have let audiences follow the words, and directors who set Verdi in car parks. The argument about whether the form is alive is as old as the form, and the answer is the same as it was in Venice: as long as a trained human voice unamplified in a large room can make two thousand people hold their breath, which it still can, someone will pay to build the room.

The line between opera and its neighbours is blurrier than the definition suggests. Opera seria, the serious Italian form of the eighteenth century, dealt with kings and heroes, while opera buffa used everyday characters and comedy, and Mozart drew on both. German composers developed the Singspiel, which mixes songs with spoken dialogue; Mozart's The Magic Flute is one, so a famous opera does not actually sing every word. French opera comique did the same, and Bizet's Carmen was first performed with spoken scenes before sung recitatives replaced them after his death.

In the nineteenth century operetta, lighter and shorter, grew out of this spoken-and-sung tradition, from Offenbach in Paris to Johann Strauss in Vienna and Gilbert and Sullivan in London, and operetta in turn fed the stage musical. The main differences between an opera and a musical today are the vocal technique, amplification and the weight given to the orchestra, rather than any strict rule. Other cultures developed sung drama independently: Chinese opera, including the Beijing form that took shape around the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, combines singing, speech, stylised gesture and acrobatics, and owes nothing to Florence.

Even listeners who speak the language often cannot make out the words when a soprano sings high, and the reason is acoustic rather than a fault of diction. Each vowel is recognised by resonances of the mouth and throat called formants, and the lowest of these for vowels such as 'ee' and 'oo' sits at only a few hundred hertz. A soprano's top notes have a fundamental frequency far above that, around 1,000 hertz near top C, so the sung tone carries almost no energy at the frequencies that would identify the vowel. There is simply not enough information in the sound.

Sopranos respond by reshaping their vowels, usually opening the jaw so that the first resonance rises to match the note being sung. This makes the voice louder for the same effort, but it pushes every vowel towards a similar open 'ah', and acoustic studies of professional singers have measured the tuning directly. Composers who care about the words tend to set important text in the middle of the range and save the highest notes for sustained vowels and climaxes, and the effect is one reason surtitles proved useful even for operas performed in the audience's own language.

For much of opera's history, audiences in London or New York watched works in Italian, German or French with only a printed libretto to follow, often in the dark. In 1983 the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto introduced surtitles, translations projected above the stage in time with the singing, and the idea spread rapidly to opera houses around the world.

Some critics feared that reading would distract from the music and drama, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York chose a different solution in 1995, small screens on the backs of seats that each listener could switch on or off. Surtitles changed opera's relationship with audiences, making jokes land and plots easy to follow, and they also eased the pressure to perform works in translation.

Opera is drama in which every word is sung, invented in Florence around 1600 as an attempt to recreate Greek tragedy and made a public art in Venice, built from recitative that tells the story, arias in which characters reflect, ensembles, chorus and orchestra, and sung by voices trained for a decade to carry over an orchestra without a microphone. Mozart made it about people, Verdi and Wagner made it the nineteenth century's central art, and it survives on the fact that nothing else does what a live voice in a theatre does.