Opera

Opera is a type of Western theatre where music is essential and singers portray the dramatic characters. The word "opera" literally means "work" in Italian. Creating an opera usually involves a composer working with a librettist, and it brings together many performing arts, including acting, set design, costumes, and sometimes dance or ballet. Performances typically take place in an opera house, with an orchestra or a smaller musical group accompanying the singers. Since the early 1800s, a conductor has led this ensemble. While musical theatre is related to opera, the two are seen as separate forms. Opera is an important part of Western classical music, especially the Italian tradition.

Originally, opera was understood as a piece that was entirely sung, unlike a play that includes songs. Over time, it has come to include many genres, some of which feature spoken dialogue, such as Singspiel and Opéra comique. In traditional number opera, singers use two main styles: recitative, which follows the natural rhythms of speech, and self-contained arias. The 19th century brought the rise of continuous music drama.

Opera began in Italy near the end of the 1500s, with Jacopo Peri's mostly lost *Dafne* (produced in Florence in 1598). It grew especially from the works of Claudio Monteverdi, notably *L'Orfeo*, and soon spread across Europe. In the 1600s, Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England each helped establish their own national traditions. During the 1700s, Italian opera dominated most of Europe (except France), attracting foreign composers like George Frideric Handel. The most prestigious form of Italian opera was opera seria, until Christoph Willibald Gluck reacted against its artificiality with his "reform" operas in the 1760s. The most famous figure of late 18th-century opera is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who began with opera seria but is best known for his Italian comic operas, including *The Marriage of Figaro*, *Don Giovanni*, and *Così fan tutte*, as well as *Die Entführung aus dem Serail* and *The Magic Flute*, which are landmarks in the German tradition.

The first third of the 1800s marked the high point of the bel canto style, with Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini creating signature works. This period also saw the rise of grand opera, typified by Daniel Auber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Carl Maria von Weber introduced German Romantische Oper. The mid-to-late 19th century was a golden age, led by Giuseppe Verdi in Italy and Richard Wagner in Germany. Opera's popularity continued through the verismo era in Italy and contemporary French opera, up to Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss in the early 1900s. During the 1800s, parallel operatic traditions emerged in central and eastern Europe, especially in Russia and Bohemia. The 20th century brought 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 recording technology, singers like Enrico Caruso and Maria Callas reached much wider audiences beyond opera fans. After the invention of radio and television, operas were performed on and written for these media. Starting in 2006, several major opera houses began presenting live high-definition video transmissions of their performances in cinemas worldwide. Since 2009, complete performances can be downloaded and live streamed.

The words of an opera are called the libretto, meaning "small book." Some composers, notably Wagner, wrote their own libretti, while others, like Mozart, worked closely with their librettists, such as Lorenzo Da Ponte. Traditional number opera consists of two singing modes: recitative, which drives the plot and imitates speech inflections, and aria, a formal song where characters express emotions in a structured melodic style. Vocal duets, trios, and other ensembles often occur, and choruses comment on the action. In some opera forms, like Singspiel, Opéra comique, operetta, and semi-opera, recitative is mostly replaced by spoken dialogue. Melodic or semi-melodic passages that occur in place of recitative are called arioso. During the Baroque and Classical periods, recitative appeared in two forms: secco (dry) recitative, sung with free rhythm and accompanied only by basso continuo (usually a harpsichord and cello), and accompagnato (or strumentato), with orchestral accompaniment. Over the 1700s, arias were increasingly accompanied by the orchestra. By the 1800s, accompagnato had become dominant, the orchestra played a much bigger role, and Wagner revolutionized opera by largely abolishing the distinction between aria and recitative in his pursuit of "endless melody." Later composers have mostly followed Wagner's example, though some, like Stravinsky in *The Rake's Progress*, have gone against this trend.