Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (libretto) and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. In traditional opera, singers do two types of singing: recitative, a speech-inflected style and arias, a more melodic style. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor.
Quotes
[edit]- No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
- W. H. Auden, in TIME magazine (29 December 1961)
- The essential novelty of Dafne and Euridice was the fusion of two apparently incompatible elements, the spoken comedy of the theatre and the lyrical melody of the chamber. Plays with incidental music were no new thing; but we can see from the musical plays of our own day that the two elements form a mechanical mixture and not a chemical combination, whether we judge the effect by the standard of Egmont or by that of The Geisha. With Dafne and Euridice the audience were taken into a new world, of which the songs and madrigals of earlier days had only shown them fleeting glimpses. Only when they were enclosed within the magic circle of unbroken musical sound from the beginning of the story to its end, could they partake of that strange and wonderful experience which opera has revealed to us, that consciousness that we ourselves are a shadows of unrealities cast for a moment on those Elysian fields where Tristan and Isolde have gone to join Orpheus and Eurydice in an existence which is real and eternal.
- Edward Joseph Dent, 'The Baroque Opera', The Musical Antiquary (January 1910), p. 97
- I love this opera. I always return to it every year because it keeps me centered. I love the story, and it reminds me to focus on what's really important in life
- Antoine Hodge according to "Up-and-coming opera singer Antoine Hodge succumbs to"COVID-19 (March 1, 2021)
- An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.
- Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1779-81), "Hughes." (Of Italian opera.)
- For, without cruelty, only a limited success is ever possible in opera.
- R. A. Lafferty, Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies (1978), in Terry Carr (ed.), The Year's Finest Fantasy: Volume 2, p. 233 (originally published in Universe 8)
