Opera Guide of an Aficionado
Letters 2024
In Memoria of Sir Andrew Davis, Lyric Opera of Chicago
Hemingway talks lovingly and a passionately of bull fighting and takes on the mantel of aficionado in Death in the Afternoon. Like him I have this passionate desire to see, hear and read all I can about the Opera. It is the transition from the Greek tragedy to our modern day theater. It is only rivaled by the great fine art paintings, and the novel for the greatest of art forms.
Aficionado and First Operas
I am an Aficionado of opera, like Hemmingway with the bullfight I have an overwhelming passion for experiencing opera, I have seen as many in performance all over the world, and seen as many as I can in performance. I am passionate about the singers, the staging, the directors, orchestras, composers, conductors etc. First operas is often the only shot most people will take on opera, so I am making a few suggestions on ones that would make the best possible impression and lead to a desire to see more.
2020 and 2021 being what they were I watched most of the Mets on demand catalog, also I had time to read a lot of source plays, libretto and history of opera. I made these years the year of theater and opera, so if it seems that I have a lot to say due to the fact that this is very recent in time and at a level of saturation that I am not normally afforded. I read source plays and libretti and histories of opera.
I first was exposed to Opera via PBS productions of the Met Opera and was hooked by Amadeus based Peter Shaffer, exceptional play. Three of note were Tosca, Macbeth and Julie Taymor’s directed, Oedipus Rex, still maybe my favorite opera production. My first live opera was Le Nozze Figaro at Chicago Lyric Opera, with Renee Fleming singing just as she was becoming recognized as the Sweet Voice.
Some bits of advice, see a good company or recording (DVD or streaming or at the movie theater) look for reviews there are bad productions of very good operas. If you like comedy see a comedy, if you like tragedy see a tragedy. Most opera houses have supertitles projected above the stage, but it is good to read a synopsis if you want to be familiar with the story.
Below is a guide to first operas, it cannot be all inclusive. If you think you would like to see something first that may be a good enough reason to see it. Also if you love a composer then you may gravitate to someone on this list. I find opera approachable in all languages, so I don’t think one language is better to start with than any other. I am listing a quite a few first options because it is an art form with a vast history and so much to see, also the best for one person is not best for all.
Met in HD, DVD, B-ray and YouTube
Met In HD is a low cost options ~25 dollars to see live sim-o-cast at theaters, very high Metropolitan Opera Performances. I have seen there entire catalog and have not found anything that is not well done. (subtitled in English). Many of the operas below can be streamed or found on DVD from the Mets vast HD catalog.
Note I have seen most operas streaming form the Met or on video, first it saved me about 3500–10000 dollars to see opera at the volume I did in 2021–2022. Met in HD has an excellent streaming catalog with membership and single opera viewing options, opera vision on YouTube also has exceptional operas also. Libraries have vast catalogs in interlibrary lone system also. The camera work and sound is very controlled in these performances. You get close ups that are better than most opera seats and the sub-titles at the bottom of the screen allow better viewing than subtitles above the stage. It is also nice to run to a local theater when one has the time or sit down with a DVD which allows one to watch longer operas in a sitting or two. I have seen almost all the operas that Anna Netrebko and Renee Fleming have sung, which would be impossible in Chicago.
That said the 30 live operas I have seen have brought me great joy, the magic of the theater and the projection of voices across the hall. If we do not support houses there will be no on demand catalog.
In Cinemas
The Met’s 2021–22 season of live movie theater transmissions features ten spectacular productions, including exciting…
Carmen
Carmen is an opera that music comes up often concert performance as instrumental adaptation or as recital performance by singers, so most people will know most of the songs in the opera; this makes it very approachable and familiar. Carmen is a fem fatale who, evokes the jealous of woman and men, she embraces lawlessness, and loves and hates in turn with passion. Bizet music is perfect and will be in your brain hours after the performance. It is loved by all and is a great place to start. Sung in French.
Eugene Onegin
One remarkable realistic story that is a very complete experience is Eugene Onegin, written and composed by Tchaikovsky. It has very organic choruses, dances and arias which are very poetic, it even has a aria, which encompasses a letter. It has as much folly and darkness as Wagner’s ring but in a real world setting by a man who sabotages his own life and those around him. The music was composed for conservatory students. This is a very complete opera and I would recommend it as a brilliant first opera for anyone to see. Sung in Russian.
The Met has three excellent versions one with Renee Fleming and TWO with Anna Netrebko
Anne Netrebko
Cavalleria Rustica & Pagliacci
Two short operas which are often performed together are two great short tragedy. From a theater point of view these are two exceptional plays and two perfect short realistic operas. They are two tales of jealousy that do not end well. One is an Easter festival that does not end well and one is a play with in a play with the saddest of clowns. Most of the populations have heard the songs from the opera in pop culture and these are two experience worth seeing for the music and the beauty of the play. Sung in Italian.
La fille du régiment
Donizetti comedy about a poor girl (who is a lost rich girl) who is raised by an regiment of soldiers, is one of the best comedies. It touches on subject of loyalty to family, those who you love and duty in a very comic way. It is an opera that you will laugh at full of wonderful slap stick. I would recommend his comedy Don Pasquale and The Elixir of Love are also great first comic options for comedy lovers. All in Italian.
The Barber Of Seville
Again most will be familiar with the music, it is a fun plot and full of good mirth and slapstick. It is played by most houses almost every season. I have seen it multiple times. It is based on an exceptional play and Rossini is musical fireworks with huge finales.
Cosi Fan Tutte
This is my favorite comic opera, but it is a problem play if you like the Shakespeare borderline comic-tragedy this is a sight to behold. Mozart and De Ponte are at there best. I love the slapstick and it reminds me of a mix of Love Labors Lost. The recording below is exceptional, and is well worth seeing at home. Mozart loves these characters and their flaws, it is his best music in my opinion.
Mozart — Cosi fan Tutte
Amazon.com: Mozart — Cosi fan Tutte : Miah Persson, Luca Pisaroni, Topi Lehtipuu, Anke Vondung, Nicolas Rivenq, Ainhoa…
THE DEEP END
There are those who love classical music or choral music who may want to dive in the deep end, or those who want the most immersive experience possible. I love these three operas with all my heart and they are great first or second operas. They are vocal and instrumental masterpieces and exemplars of opera.
Der Rosenkavalier
This is my favorite comedy, which is full of folly balanced by wisdom. It like all great comedies goes deep into human failing. It introduces one of t he greatest character in Opera, the Marshallian, a field marshals wife, who realizes that her infatuation with a young lover will not last, that she will grow old and lose this love, then she plots for him to fall in love with a young girl. She also comically dismantles the proposed marriage of her cousin comically, so that the young girl marries her young lover instead of the horrible cad who is out for wealth and connection and not love. Strauss is at his very best in the music and I like only one Strauss opera more.
There are several recordings of this opera and I recommend any with the greatest Marshallian of our age, Renee Fleming, her last performance was recorded by the Met in HD series. It will be great to see live but Renee has given up the role if you like this opera see this performance. Sung in German
Salome
My favorite Strauss opera, but it is the darkest opera maybe ever written (Other than Strauss Elektra). It is based about the Salome selling herself to King Herod for the head of John the Baptist. It is a gruesome horror filled opera, not for your grandmother (unless your grandma love that sort of thing) or children. Nadja Michel is the best Salome currently, and is captivating and monstrous. The orchestra is one of the largest in all operas, it is bold, dark, monstrous and deeply moving. Sung in German
Strauss: Salome [Blu-ray]
Quick Shipping !!! New And Sealed !!! This Disc WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. A multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD…
The Ring Cycle
Wagner’s Ring Cycle is four operas. I have heard many going in for a four opera season and seeing this first. Often with a love of opera as a result but know you are going for four performance and 16 hours of music going in. It is a vocal and orchestral masterpiece. It is a complete mythology. It is filled with Gods and humans both cursed and tragic. It has long instrumental sections and is sung as a continuous poem so no arias, it is a completely different musical experience. The Met has a great HD offering which I have seen twice. Make sure if you see it live that you are going to see a production you like I would do serious investigation before seeing it live.
The Modern
L’Amour de Loin ~Saariaho
Saariaho is a brilliant composer and Susanne Philips and Eric Owens are wonderous in the Mets version of this. The staging is wonderfully light driven setting letting the singing take the lead in a magical world. The title translates as Love From Afar, it is a romance set to moving and challenging music. Robert Lapage is a staging genius. Sung in French
Tempest ~Ades
Ades is an exceptional composer and this adaptation of Shakespeare is the very best. The cast is hand picked by Ades, Robert Lapage does the sets to perfection and Ades conducts. It rivals Verdi’s Shakespeare opera in excellence.
Stravinsky -Oedipus Rex
If you love Stravinsky than this is what you should see as your first opera, there is an exceptional staging by Julie Taymor, with Philip Langridge and Jessye Norman who are exemplars of the roles. The staging is magical. This is my favorite opera of all time, I saw this on PBS as my first full opera, it is still magical. Best stage effects in opera, the best singers and the best chorus. I think the best version of the Oedipus myth set to stage. Sung in Latin. Libretto by Jean Cocteau. English narration between scenes translated by ee cummings.
Complete and Incomplete
Gesamtkunstwerk was Wagner’s term for a total work of art. Wagner wanted a complete work of language sound, stage craft, orchestra and singers all as an instrument of the composer. . Gesamtkunstwerk was an attach on Italian Grand Opera, which Wagner saw full of extraneous song driven performances and recitatives that were less musical that drove along silly plots.
Wagner attempted make the play a sung text replacing arias and recitatives with the music a continuum of a unrepetitive sung lines, a dramatic text instead of a series of aria linked by short burst of exposition. Wagner’s greatest opera does achieve this singing form. Yet his Ring Cycle has a very incomplete and mythic plot, full of incest, dragons, giants and failed gods. The text is very exciting in performance and he really achieves a unity of concept in sound but his plot has glaring unreality. I think his Parsifal is the closest we get to Gesamtkunstwerk, even though it is mythic also, it does unify a coherent story with a inspired orchestration and utilization of the human voice.
Wagner chief opponent is Giuseppe Verdi who was a champion of the an improved aria driven opera, which was in direct response to Wagner. Don Carlos maybe the grand opera exemplar was driven by duets, and trio and choruses, it did not have Wagner’s continuous line, but it did respond in a way along Wagner’s line. Verdi’s Don Carlo, Falstaff, Othello and Mac Beth all seem to achieve in spirit Gesamtkunstwerk in being a complete work of art, all were based on excellent plays by Shakespeare and Shiller and that they did not follow Wagner’s theory of a sung play. In this complete work the Gesamtkunstwerk Wagner actually wanted to remove arts such as Ballet music and Dance, Aria, and wanted the libretto to be more of a poem than a play.
The great synthesis of both men’s ambitions came in the operas by Strauss with his continuous line Salome and his complex and grand Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne Aux Naxos. A great deal of operas while being very enjoyable have a problem of being very incomplete, often having silly convoluted plots and over melodramatic construction. Two examples are the middle act finales of Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro where there is very exciting vocal and orchestral fireworks but it has little do with the plot, it sort of explodes in a lovely mess, then you get the rest of the opera, which ignores this explosion. I think if there was not a curtain and intermission these mid opera stopping points would be a problem, but the intermission allows us to reset and we are just able to have drink and wonder at what we have just seen.
Gesamtkunstwerk is far from a necessity to enjoy opera, there are many people go for the singing, some for the staging, and some just to be seen in a box seat. I love most of opera and I have come to enjoy very complete works and very incomplete works. Donizetti Three Queen Trilogy, are completely inaccurate and romanticized but they have excellent singing and music and plots that tell a historic fiction worth contending with. I like the silly comedies and forgive finales that are silly or contrived if they are wonderfully sung.
Composer and Librettist
Opera is vocal music, the debate over words verses music has always been with opera. In my opinion operas can survive and do survive weak librettos but no libretto has saved a weakly composted opera. Yet when the two come together words and music wonderous things happen. There are some opera plots that are a unholy mess and are held together solely by the beauty of the music. Many operas have good stories as myth or fairy tales.
Rarely is the writer of music and libretto the same person. Most operas are collaborations. Wagner is famous for creations of his own ‘poems’ and his own music and is a great exception to this rule. There are three great collaborations that come to mind in Opera Mozart and De Ponte, Verdi and Boito, and Strauss and Von Hofmannsthal.
Mozart and De Ponte created three operas, Le Nozze Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutti, of exceeding beauty both in plot and complexity of song. Two operas are adaptations while Cosi Fan Tutti was original and may be both men at their dramatic, comic and musical best.
Othello, Falstaff and Simon Boccanegra are exceptional works for bass and baritone. The two Shakespearian adaptations and are two of my favorite depiction of Shakespeare’s work, they show the flexibly of Shakespeare and the genius of Boito librettos and Verdi’s Music. Three masters co-exist in these adaptations.
I adore all the operas, Strauss and Von Hofmannsthal that I have seen, but Elektra is the darkest and closest to the Greek roots of theater that may exist, it is primal, distant, barbaric, yet calls for an incredible orchestra and the loveliest of singers. Der Rosenkavalier has notes of the Merchant of Venice, the passing of an era, and the tension between age and young love. It’s has the comic gender swap of Shakespeare with the Tragedy of The Marschallian, who gives up her young lover because he deserves young love and to protect a young woman from a marriage of convenience. It calls for two great sopranos and an exceptional mezzo soprano and a exceptional bass.
Fleming as The Marschallin
The Singers
The thing that attracts me to opera is taking a human voice to the limits its potential beauty in combination with glorious music. Opera productions are most times unamplified sound, having lived in the cheap seats it is amazing when a voice can file a 3000 seat hall and compete with an entire orchestra. These musicians often have to be good actors who have to physically act and show emotion while singing, but the sound of the voice is the great enhancement to the play and gives a very inner voice to the character. Often the aria is an internal voice that while sung in front of people is the hidden ideas of the character, it is a trope of opera that gives it great power you often know things that the characters on the stage are unaware of.
The voice has pitch range and singers are defined often by the range they can sing, male falsetto, to female soprano, female mezzo soprano, male tenors, male baritones and basses are key ranges and composers write music especially for each range, great singers bridge their range and extend into an adjacent range.
I am most attracted to sopranos and mezzo. My four favorite of my life time are, the great Anna Netrebko, Renee Fleming, Nadja Michel and Suzanna Philips. All are exceptional actresses and are worth seeing in performance, they have never disappointed in my experience.
Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth
Nadja Michel as Salome
Susanna Philips with Eric Owens
Chorus
The Chorus goes back to the Greek theater which opera originally attempts to emulate. The chorus is often a public voice commenting on the action of the opera, it can range from a permissive to prudish, often the chorus also comes in at big moments in the action and often are to add backing voices to the primary singers. They are often the most popular and beautiful parts of operas and without them opera would be lesser. They play both a character role of the community and a vocal orchestration that enhances the opera.
Chorus of Witches from Macbeth -Chicago Lyric Opera
Music, Orchestra and Conductor
Metropolitan Opera Pit
Opera has two musical components the singer and the orchestra. In opera’s development the orchestra was for accompaniment of the singers but as opera has progressed a has increased orchestration has arisen, this has driven some operas to the point of being rarely performed because of limitation of singers that can compete with the pit, but these are some of the most well attended operas because the music and the singing are the most deep. Limitation of the opera pit size has lead to some smaller houses limiting their reparatory, or going with a leaner orchestra. I love balance between singer and the pit, but my favorite operas are by Strauss, so I lean towards heavy orchestration and love the new instruments that were invented by Wagner’s for his operas.
There various ways to tell the story so we should discuss the recitatives. Early operas had play story line told in spoken words, and then evolved to simple harpsicord accompaniment to sort of artificial sung line this is rather popular and long running idea in opera. As opera progressed, the recitative improved and become more complex especially as full orchestration of the recitatives came into practice, also as recitatives never became aria but they became more song like as time progressed. Wagner departed from the recitative and the aria completely with continuous singing to move the plot in a more play like sung poem, which has greatly influenced modern opera. Strauss may have taken this to its apex in Salome.
The company , the orchestra, and the singer is lead by the conductor. Conductors are vital to the house and productions, they are key to the level of rehearsals and selection of singers and integrating the production with the music. They are grand organizers, leaders and tyrants of the pit and stage. My two favorite have Chicago connections the greatest opera conductor of my life (as well as the CSO) is Daniel Barenboim, he gets it all out of his performer and the orchestra. He is one of the worlds greatest pianist in the world today as well.
The most operas I have seen in performance were conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, he is the conductor of my house the Chicago Lyric, he has lead the house, since I started attending operas and I hope his tenure last as long as possible.
Daniel Barenboim
Sir Andrew Davis
Directors
Stage direction can be very complex using elevators, flying sets, moving sets, rotating sets, cranes, machines etc. Art work on stage from painting to sets has to be integrated by performance. Modern opera directors are becoming to be as much of a draw as the performers. Also opera sets are expensive so a director may have an affect on an opera house or multiple house for decades.
Director, also have to work with set designers, costume, wigs, make up artists. But they have to pull the singer and the orchestra into the performance.
Two exemplars of great modern production are David McVicar who has done excellent production for the Met and Royal Opera house and whos opera production affect many houses, he has played with idea of plays with in plays and used Goya are to wonderful effect and Robert Lapage, and his grand machine for Wagner’s ring (which required the met build structural reinforcements to the stage), has pushed technology to wonderful organic limits, his production of The Ring and his L’Amour de Loin are wonders of beauty along a new path.
Lapage’s Machine