30-Second Opera

The 50 crucial concepts, roles and performers, each explained in half a minute

Hugo Shirley

• Publisher: Ivy Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782402992
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

The bestselling 30-Second… series takes a revolutionary approach to learning about those subjects you feel you should really understand. Each title selects a popular topic and dissects it into the 50 most significant ideas at its heart.Every idea, no matter how complex, is explained in 300 words and one image, all digestible in just 30 seconds. Live operatic performance was once part of popular culture yet in modern times it has become caricatured as exclusive, overwhelming and, often, very very long. 30-Second Opera raises the curtain so that anyone can enjoyopera, classical or contemporary, without the elitism. Compiled by opera buffs, not the bourgeoisie, it serves up all you need to enjoy the spectacle, the music, and above all the voices – from Farinelli tofemme fatale.

KEY COMPOSERS

KEY COMPOSERS

GLOSSARY

concerto Similar in form to the Symphony, the concerto would feature a solo instrument (but also, particularly during the Baroque period, more than one) playing with an orchestra. The three-movement solo concerto became the norm in the second half of the eighteenth century, with Mozart’s for piano (he wrote 27) often containing aria-like slow movements.

crescendo A term (literally meaning, ‘growing’) indicating that music should get louder. In a score it might be abbreviated to ‘cresc.’ or represented graphically by a hairpin (<) stretched out to indicate the length of the crescendo. ‘Decrescendo’ (or ‘decresc.’) is the opposite, represented by a hairpin pointing the other way (>).

intermedio/intermezzo Usually believed to be the main precursor to opera itself, the ‘intermedio’ was a form of lavish entertainment including music, singing and dancing and devised to fit between the acts of a play performed at court. The earliest records of intermedi date from the late fifteenth century. The related term intermezzo refers to a similar practice that saw discrete comic interludes performed during opere serie right up until the Baroque period. The term would make a comeback in the later 1800s, with orchestral intermezzi appearing in late nineteenth-century works such as Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Cavalleria rusticana (whose intermezzo was made famous by Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull) and Pagliacci.

madrigal A form of vocal composition dating back to the late thirteenth century, the madrigal was usually composed for several voices to secular texts, meaning that it could develop complexities that would not have been permitted in sacred music. Monteverdi’s madrigals are perhaps the finest, and while the form originated in Italy, it was imported to many other European countries, including to Elizabethan England.

‘The Mighty Handful’ (sometimes called ‘The Five’) This group of Russian composers (Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and the now less well-known Balakirev and Cui) set out to build a Russian operatic tradition on the foundations laid by Glinka and his operas (including Ruslan and Ludmilla and A Life for the Tsar). Largely self-taught, these five had an ambivalent relationship towards Tchaikovsky, whose music was deemed to be too ‘western’. More broadly, the group reflected the nationalism that spread across many countries outside the traditional operatic centres of Europe (France, Germany and Italy).

operetta Originating in Paris in the 1850s, operetta (meaning, literally, ‘little opera’, and in earlier times also applied straightforwardly to smaller-scale operatic works) was established as a satirical and genuinely comic alternative to the increasingly non-comic and pretentious opéra-comique. The works of Jacques Offenbach, setting the pattern of quick-fire dialogue interspersed with musical numbers, in particular, relentlessly poke fun at established operatic traditions, as well as all elements of the wider establishment, a tradition taken up by Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain. Viennese operetta, which reached its heyday around the turn of the twentieth century, provides a characteristic mix of humour and nostalgia while also reflecting political concerns – a mixture that can often be seen in the twentieth-century musical, a closely related genre.

oratorio A sacred cousin to opera, the oratorio is typically a composition that sets a sacred text adapted, usually, from the Bible for a number of soloists, chorus and orchestra. Sometimes the oratorios, although rooted in the concert hall, can come close to opera in their dramatic power, and several in the early eighteenth century were, essentially, operas in sacred garb. Handel’s oratorios are among the best known and the most operatic: several, including The Messiah and Saul, have been staged by opera companies.

polyphony A term ...