#123: A Good Time for Opera
Opera has a bad rap: it's stuffy, long, convoluted, expensive, weird \u2026 and at the end of the day, who really understands sung Italian anyway? The barriers aren\u2019t just financial: there are hundreds of years of musical history at work, along with dozens of arcane terms that defy pronunciation. But opera has been loved by ardent fans for centuries, and the experience of seeing it\u2014once you know what to listen for\u2014can be sublime. So we asked Vivien Schweitzer, a former classical music and opera critic for The New York Times, to teach us how to listen to opera. This episode originally aired in November 2018.
Go beyond the episode:
- Read Vivien Schweitzer\u2019s A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera
- Catch a free nightly stream of a Metropolitan Opera production
- Listen to the accompanying Spotify playlist
- Ready? Find an opera performance near you by searching the National Opera Center of America\u2019s database of upcoming offerings
- Listen to the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s Saturday Matinee Broadcasts or catch it live in a movie theater near you
- At The Guardian, Imogen Tilde explains \u201cHow to find cheap opera tickets\u201d
Songs sampled during the episode:
- \u201cPossente spirito,\u201d the first famous aria in opera, from Monteverdi\u2019s Orfeo
- \u201cPur te miro,\u201d the first important duet in opera, from Monteverdi\u2019s L\u2019incoronazione di Poppea
- \u201cSvegliatevi nel core,\u201d an example of da capo aria and a rage aria, from Handel\u2019s Giulio Cesare
- The Queen of the Night\u2019s first-act aria, an example of very high soprano notes, from Mozart\u2019s Die Zauberfl\xf6te
- \u201cO Isis und Osiris,\u201d an example of very low bass notes from the same opera
- \u201cAh! mes amis, quel jour de f\xeate!\u201d an example of very high tenor notes, from Donizetti\u2019s La fille du r\xe9giment
- \u201cCasta diva,\u201d an example of bel canto style of singing, from Bellini\u2019s Norma
- \u201cBella figlia dell\u2019amore,\u201d an example of ensemble singing from Verdi\u2019s Rigoletto
- The infamous Tristan chord from the prelude to Wagner\u2019s Tristan and Isolde (and here is the resolution of the chord, hours later)
For a taste of contemporary opera's eclecticism, here are three examples:
- Das M\xe4dchen mit den Schwefelh\xf6lzern by Helmut Lachenmann, an example of an opera with no actual singing
- Satyagraha by Philip Glass, an example of minimalism
- Saint Francois D\u2019Assise by Olivier Messiaen, a composer who imitated birdcalls in his music
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