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Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (19 ed.)
...opera, writing some 42 musical works for the stage, including some semi-operas and one full opera, Dido and Aeneas ( 1689 ). See also light opera ( under light ). Opéra bouffe (French bouffe , ‘buffoon’) A form of comic opera or operetta. See also opera buffa . Opera buffa A form of light opera, with musical numbers and dialogue in recitative. The plot may even be farcical. Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro ( 1786 ) and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale ( 1843 ) are examples of the form. It is the opposite of opera seria . Opéra comique A type of opera...
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World Encyclopedia
... Stage drama that is sung. It combines acting, singing, orchestral music, set and costume design, making spectacular entertainment. The best-known opera houses include La Scala (Milan), the Opéra (Paris), the Royal Opera (London), the State Opera (Vienna), the Festspiele (Bayreuth), and the Metropolitan Opera (New York City). Opera began in Italy in c .1600 . The classical style evolved in c .1750 ; its greatest exponent was Mozart . Verdi and Wagner dominated 19th-century opera. The 20th century brought a profusion of styles by composers as...
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Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy
... . On the opera based on Tess of the d'Urbervilles , see Tess opera . An opera by Stephen Paulus based on The Woodlanders (libretto by Colin Graham ) was produced in St Louis in 1985 . On the opera based on The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall , see Boughton, Rutland . On unfulfilled plans to turn works by Hardy into operas, see Britten, Benjamin ; Elgar, Edward...
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The Oxford Companion to Irish History (2 ed.)
...etc.), revived the popularity of the genre itself. The presentation of regular seasons of opera was achieved only in 1941 by the founding of the Dublin Grand Opera Society, based at the Gaiety theatre, Dublin. The Wexford Opera Festival, established in 1951 by T. J. Walsh , explores little‐known works and enjoys an international reputation. Touring companies and smaller companies such as the Irish National Opera ( 1965 ), Opera Theatre Company ( 1986 ), and Opera Northern Ireland have significantly advanced both opportunities for young Irish singers and...
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The Oxford Companion to English Literature (7 ed.)
...years. Purcell's text was by Nahum Tate , and fully‐fledged operas were, in the 18th and 19th centuries, normally written to a specific libretto rather than adapted from a stage play. Not all operas are sung throughout: the English ballad opera of the 1730s and the comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan in the 1890s have prose dialogue interspersed with songs. In the late 19th century English composers began attempting to revive opera as a serious form, and though Hubert Parry 's opera Guenever ( 1886 ), written under the dominating influence of ...
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John Dizikes
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History
... Opera came to America in 1735 , in the form of English ballad opera featuring spoken dialog, new lyrics set to familiar tunes, and subjects taken from ordinary life. In the 1790s, French opera reached New Orleans. Italian opera made its debut in 1825 with the appearance of the Manuel Garcia Company in New York City. Lacking both court and aristocratic patronage and state subsidy, opera in America confronted the vagaries of a market economy. With no music schools to train native-born performers and composers, American opera-goers until well into the...
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John Dizikes
The Oxford Companion to United States History
...Opera. Opera came to America in 1735 , in the form of English ballad opera featuring spoken dialogue, new lyrics set to familiar tunes, and subjects taken from ordinary life. In the 1790s, French opera reached New Orleans . Italian opera made its debut in 1825 with the appearance of the Manuel Garcia Company in New York City . Lacking both court and aristocratic patronage and state subsidy, opera in America confronted the vagaries of a market economy. With no music schools to train native-born performers and composers, American operagoers until well into...
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The Oxford Dictionary of Music (6 ed.)
..., whose operas achieved and have retained a wide popularity because of their musical and dramatic colour and immediate appeal. La bohème in particular is among the most frequently perf of all operas, with Madama Butterfly running it close. Opera in Eng. was for many years mainly an imported commodity. Only Purcell ’s short Dido and Aeneas ( 1683–4 ) and the ballad‐opera The Beggar’s Opera ( 1728 ) were of any quality among native products, although Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl ( 1843 ) achieved popularity. Sullivan wrote a grand opera ( Ivanhoe )...
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The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature
...tradition, in which ballet and chorus had continued to play a conspicuous part. Throughout the 18th c. Italian opera was an international art form, and much of the finest Italian opera was composed oustide Italy by non-Italian composers, notably Handel , Gluck , and Mozart . After the upheavals of the Revolutionary period, Rossini opened up Italian opera to new Romantic subject matter, and fused elements from opera buffa and opera seria in a structural synthesis handled with such flair and authority that it came to be known (by analogy with the...
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Irena Cholij and Stanley Wells
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...attack on Italian opera during this period was John Gay ’s parody The Beggar’s Opera ( 1728 ), which used ballad tunes rather than more sophisticated newly composed music. The Beggar’s Opera spawned a large number of other ballad operas, of which the only Shakespearian one was James Worsdale’s two-act ballad farce A Cure for a Scold ( 1735 ), based on The Taming of the Shrew . Despite this discomfort with all-sung English opera, several attempts were made in the 18th century to create all-sung English Shakespearian operas. In 1755 John...
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Maria Purciello, Maria F. Rich, Victor Fell Yellin, H. Wiley Hitchcock, June C. Ottenberg, Katherine K. Preston, Maria F. Rich, Victor Fell Yellin, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Carolyn Guzski, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Maria F. Rich, Victor Fell Yellin, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Michael V. Pisani, Michael Miller, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Melanie Feilotter
The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2 ed.)
...Opera San José 1984 4/32 (10/14) Sept, Nov, Feb, April Austin Lyric Opera 1985 3/12 Nov, Jan, April BUDGETS $1–$3 MILLION Chautauqua Opera 1929 4/8 (13/16) July–Aug Kentucky Opera 1952 5/10 Sept–Nov Tulsa Opera 1953 3/9 Oct, Feb, April Madison Opera 1953 4/7 Nov, Jan, April, July Opera Columbus 1958 (reorganized 1981) 2/4 Oct, Feb Opera Omaha 1958 3/8 Nov, Feb, April Dayton Opera 1960 4/11 Oct, April, May Syracuse Opera 1963 3/6 (4/4) Oct, Feb, April Chicago Opera Theater 1973 3/15 April–May Indianapolis Opera 1975 4/8. Oct, Nov, March Knoxville Opera 1976...
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The Companion to Theatre and Performance
... Dramatic work in which the *action is sung by solo singers and often a *chorus , to orchestral, instrumental, or keyboard accompaniment. Some operas include passages of spoken *dialogue over accompaniment. Opera by nature of its musical idiom is most suited to the representation of the extremes of human conduct. The actions of many operas, therefore, involve the spectacular *rituals , conflicts, and confrontations of political, social, and military life, but they also explore the most intimate human emotions. On the whole opera does not successfully...
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Eric Cross
The Oxford Companion to British History (2 ed.)
... . The general term, taken from the Italian opera meaning work, describes a staged drama in which the actors sing some or all of their parts. Opera involves a union of music, drama, and spectacle in varying degrees; although the first Florentine operas around 1600 emphasized the text through recitative—a form of heightened speech—music soon became the dominant partner. While all-sung opera has always been the norm in Italy, the strong British tradition of spoken drama favoured the masque , and spoken drama with music remained the pattern for dramatic...
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Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
... The status of opera as an artistic medium is problematic. The difficulty derives primarily from the combination of various elements—music, text, drama, dance, stage design—to form the experience of opera. Opera is often viewed as a musical genre, but it has also been thought of, mostly through Richard Wagner 's conception of the total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) , as the form of art par excellence, the synthesis of all artistic media. It is commonly held that opera originated in an act of invention by a circle of theoreticians, the Florentine Camerata , in...
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The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French
...both his operas and writings (see his preface to Alceste of 1769 ). 19th‐c. Paris was very cosmopolitan. The Opéra was a fashionable place to visit and the majority of significant works performed there were not French. Although Italian opera had now fully infiltrated France, it was still performed in a separate theatre, the Théâtre Italian, where Rossini was for a time director, and drew a more aristocratic audience than the Opéra. Stendhal was perhaps Italian opera's most passionate follower and wrote extensively on its attractions. The Opéra was also...
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The Oxford Dictionary of Music (6 ed.)
... Monthly magazine covering news and reports of all operatic matters founded 1950 by Earl of Harewood, who was ed. until 1953 , when he was succeeded by Harold Rosenthal . Rodney Milnes ed. 1986–99 , John Allison from 2000...
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Tom C. Owens
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World
...styles were serious, opera seria, and comic, opera buffa. Reaching its high point by mid-century, opera seria was conventional and artificial in drama and music. Arias were almost always in da capo Wagnerian Opera. Arrival of Lohengrin, anonymous illustration from Wagner and His Ideals (c. 1885–1888). Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (ABA) form, and the singing character left the stage after each aria. As late as 1791 composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ( 1756–1791 ) continued to write operas in this tradition, with some...
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Oxford Reader’s Companion To Conrad
...a libretto for a Puccini opera anyhow’ ( CL , v. 452). Fifty-five years would pass before the opera by Richard Rodney Bennett in three acts, with a libretto by Beverley Cross, opened at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 13 April 1970 . Bennett’s fourth opera and the first ever to be commissioned for the Royal Opera by the Friends of Covent Garden, it was produced by Colin Graham , designed by Alex Stone , and conducted by Edward Downes . There were plans to tour with Georg Solit to West Berlin and perhaps Munich. The opera was revived at Covent...
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Carl Morey
The Oxford Companion to Canadian History
... . Although a few operatic performances were heard in Halifax, Quebec, and Montreal in the 18th century, it was only from the mid-19th century that the towns and cities in Lower and Upper Canada heard opera on a regular basis, thanks to touring companies that mostly originated in the United States. By 1900 opera had become genuinely popular entertainment in Ontario and Quebec and by the mid-20th century Montreal and Toronto were familiar with most of the standard repertoire. The cpr marked the completion of the transcontinental railway by building the...
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Michael Ewans
The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4 ed.)
... The Florentine Camerata—a group of humanists, musicians and intellectuals—invented opera, which was to become a major western art form, at the end of the 16th cent. ad . Its members believed that Greek tragedy was sung throughout, and sought to devise a new medium which would equal its perceived excellence. The first operas (e.g. Peri's Eurydice , 1600 ) largely consisted of declamatory recitative, and it was only with Monteverdi's Venetian operas— Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria ( 1640 ), and L'incoronazione di Poppea ( 1642 )—that a true expressive...
