ETYM Italian, from opera work, composition, opposed to an improvisation, from Latin opera pains work, from opus, operis, work, labor: cf. French opéra. Related to Operate.
1. A drama set to music; consists of singing with orchestral accompaniment and an orchestral overture and interludes.
2. Theater where opera is performed; SYN. opera house.
Dramatic musical work in which singing takes the place of speech. In opera the music accompanying the action has paramount importance, although dancing and spectacular staging may also play their parts. Opera originated in late 16th-century Florence when the musical declamation, lyrical monologues, and choruses of Classical Greek drama were reproduced in current forms.
Early development.
One of the earliest opera composers was Jacopo Peri, whose Euridice influenced Claudio Monteverdi, the first great master of the operatic form. Initially solely a court entertainment, opera soon became popular, and in 1637 the first public opera house was opened in Venice. It spread to other Italian towns, to Paris (about 1645), and to Vienna and Germany, where it remained Italian at the courts but became partly German at Hamburg from about 1680.
In the later 17th century the elaborately conventional aria, designed to display the virtuosity of the singer, became predominant, overshadowing the dramatic element. Composers of this type of opera included Pier Cavalli, Pietro Antonio Cesti (1623–1669), and Alessandro Scarlatti. In France opera was developed by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau, and in England by Henry Purcell, but the Italian style retained its ascendancy, as exemplified by George Handel.
Comic opera (opera buffa) was developed in Italy by such composers as Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736), while in England The Beggar’s Opera 1728 by John Gay started the vogue of the ballad opera, using popular tunes and spoken dialogue. Singspiel was the German equivalent (although its music was newly composed). A lessening of artificiality began with Christoph Gluck, who insisted on the preeminence of the dramatic over the purely vocal element. Wolfgang Mozart learned much from Gluck in writing his serious operas, but excelled in Italian opera buffa. In works such as The Magic Flute, he laid the foundations of a purely German-language opera, using the Singspiel as a basis. This line was continued by Ludwig van Beethoven in Fidelio and by the work of Carl Weber, who introduced the Romantic style for the first time in opera.
Developments into the 19th century.
The Italian tradition, which placed the main stress on vocal display and melodic suavity (bel canto), continued unbroken into the 19th century in the operas of Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini. It is in the Romantic operas of Weber and Meyerbeer that the work of Richard Wagner has its roots. Dominating the operatic scene of his time, Wagner attempted to create, in his “music-dramas”, a new art form, and completely transformed the 19th-century conception of opera. In Italy, Guiseppe Verdi assimilated, in his mature work, much of the Wagnerian technique, without sacrificing the Italian virtues of vocal clarity and melody. This tradition was continued by Giacomo Puccini. In French opera in the mid-19th century, represented by such composers as Leo Delibes, Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Jules Massenet, the drama was subservient to the music. Comic opera (opéra comique), as represented in the works of André Gréry (1741–1813) and, later, Daniel Auber, became a popular genre in.
Paris. More serious artistic ideals were put into practice by Hector Berlioz in The Trojans, but the merits of his work were largely unrecognized in his own time.
George Bizet’s Carmen began a trend toward realism in opera; his lead was followed in Italy by Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, and Puccini. Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande represented a reaction against the overemphatic emotionalism of Wagnerian opera. National operatic styles were developed in Russia by Mikhail Glinka, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Peter Tchaikovsky, and in Bohemia by Bedrich Smetana and, later, Dvorák and Janácek. Several composers of light opera emerged, including Arthur Sullivan, Franz Lehár, Jacques Offenbach, and Johann Strauss.
20th-century opera.
In the 20th century the Viennese school produced an outstanding opera in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, and the Romanticism of Wagner was revived by Richard Strauss in Der Rosenkavalier. Other 20th-century composers of opera include George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and John Adams in the us; Gerhard, Michael Tippett, Benjamin Britten, and Harrison Birtwistle in the uk; Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Hans Henze in Germany; Luigi Dallapiccola and Goffreddo Petrassi in Italy; and the Soviet composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich. The operatic form has developed in many different directions, for example, toward oratorio in Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex 1925, and toward cabaret and music-theater, as represented by the works of Kurt Weill.

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