title: Opera

text: Opera seria had its weaknesses and critics. The taste for embellishment on behalf of the superbly trained singers, and the use of spectacle as a replacement for dramatic purity and unity drew attacks. Francesco Algarotti's "Essay on the Opera" (1755) proved to be an inspiration for Christoph Willibald Gluck's reforms. He advocated that "opera seria" had to return to basics and that all the various elements—music (both instrumental and vocal), ballet, and staging—must be subservient to the overriding drama. In 1765 Melchior Grimm published "", an influential article for the Encyclopédie on lyric and opera librettos. Several composers of the period, including Niccolò Jommelli and Tommaso Traetta, attempted to put these ideals into practice. The first to succeed however, was Gluck. Gluck strove to achieve a "beautiful simplicity". This is evident in his first reform opera, "Orfeo ed Euridice", where his non-virtuosic vocal melodies are supported by simple harmonies and a richer orchestra presence throughout.


title: Opera

text: Gluck's reforms have had resonance throughout operatic history. Weber, Mozart, and Wagner, in particular, were influenced by his ideals. Mozart, in many ways Gluck's successor, combined a superb sense of drama, harmony, melody, and counterpoint to write a series of comic operas with libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte, notably "Le nozze di Figaro", "Don Giovanni", and "Così fan tutte", which remain among the most-loved, popular and well-known operas. But Mozart's contribution to "opera seria" was more mixed; by his time it was dying away, and in spite of such fine works as "Idomeneo" and "La clemenza di Tito", he would not succeed in bringing the art form back to life again.


title: Opera

text: The bel canto opera movement flourished in the early 19th century and is exemplified by the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Pacini, Mercadante and many others. Literally "beautiful singing", "bel canto" opera derives from the Italian stylistic singing school of the same name. Bel canto lines are typically florid and intricate, requiring supreme agility and pitch control. Examples of famous operas in the bel canto style include Rossini's "Il barbiere di Siviglia" and "La Cenerentola", as well as Bellini's "Norma", "La sonnambula" and "I puritani" and Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor", "L'elisir d'amore" and "Don Pasquale".


title: Opera

text: Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly popularized by Giuseppe Verdi, beginning with his biblical opera "Nabucco". This opera, and the ones that would follow in Verdi's career, revolutionized Italian opera, changing it from merely a display of vocal fireworks, with Rossini's and Donizetti's works, to dramatic story-telling. Verdi's operas resonated with the growing spirit of Italian nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era, and he quickly became an icon of the patriotic movement for a unified Italy. In the early 1850s, Verdi produced his three most popular operas: "Rigoletto", "Il trovatore" and "La traviata". The first of these, "Rigoletto", proved the most daring and revolutionary. In it, Verdi blurs the distinction between the aria and recitative as it never before was, leading the opera to be "an unending string of duets". "La traviata" was also novel. It tells the story of courtesan, and is often cited as one of the first "realistic" operas, because rather than featuring great kings and figures from literature, it focuses on the tragedies of ordinary life and society. After these, he continued to develop his style, composing perhaps the greatest French grand opera, "Don Carlos", and ending his career with two Shakespeare-inspired works, "Otello" and "Falstaff", which reveal how far Italian opera had grown in sophistication since the early 19th century. These final two works showed Verdi at his most masterfully orchestrated, and are both incredibly influential, and modern. In "Falstaff", Verdi sets the preeminent standard for the form and style that would dominate opera throughout the twentieth century. Rather than long, suspended melodies, "Falstaff" contains many little motifs and mottos, that, rather than being expanded upon, are introduced and subsequently dropped, only to be brought up again later. These motifs never are expanded upon, and just as the audience expects a character to launch into a long melody, a new character speaks, introducing a new phrase. This fashion of opera directed opera from Verdi, onward, exercising tremendous influence on his successors Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten.


title: Opera

text: After Verdi, the sentimental "realistic" melodrama of verismo appeared in Italy. This was a style introduced by Pietro Mascagni's "Cavalleria rusticana" and Ruggero Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" that came to dominate the world's opera stages with such popular works as Giacomo Puccini's "La bohème", "Tosca", and "Madama Butterfly". Later Italian composers, such as Berio and Nono, have experimented with modernism.


title: Opera

text: The first German opera was "Dafne", composed by Heinrich Schütz in 1627, but the music score has not survived. Italian opera held a great sway over German-speaking countries until the late 18th century. Nevertheless, native forms would develop in spite of this influence. In 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the first "Singspiel", "Seelewig", a popular form of German-language opera in which singing alternates with spoken dialogue. In the late 17th century and early 18th century, the Theater am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg presented German operas by Keiser, Telemann and Handel. Yet most of the major German composers of the time, including Handel himself, as well as Graun, Hasse and later Gluck, chose to write most of their operas in foreign languages, especially Italian. In contrast to Italian opera, which was generally composed for the aristocratic class, German opera was generally composed for the masses and tended to feature simple folk-like melodies, and it was not until the arrival of Mozart that German opera was able to match its Italian counterpart in musical sophistication. The theatre company of Abel Seyler pioneered serious German-language opera in the 1770s, marking a break with the previous simpler musical entertainment.


title: Opera

text: Mozart's "Singspiele", "Die Entführung aus dem Serail" (1782) and "Die Zauberflöte" (1791) were an important breakthrough in achieving international recognition for German opera. The tradition was developed in the 19th century by Beethoven with his "Fidelio" (1805), inspired by the climate of the French Revolution. Carl Maria von Weber established German Romantic opera in opposition to the dominance of Italian bel canto. His "Der Freischütz" (1821) shows his genius for creating a supernatural atmosphere. Other opera composers of the time include Marschner, Schubert and Lortzing, but the most significant figure was undoubtedly Wagner.


title: Opera

text: Wagner was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history. Starting under the influence of Weber and Meyerbeer, he gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a "Gesamtkunstwerk" (a "complete work of art"), a fusion of music, poetry and painting. He greatly increased the role and power of the orchestra, creating scores with a complex web of leitmotifs, recurring themes often associated with the characters and concepts of the drama, of which prototypes can be heard in his earlier operas such as "Der fliegende Holländer", "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin"; and he was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such as tonality, in his quest for greater expressivity. In his mature music dramas, "Tristan und Isolde", "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg", "Der Ring des Nibelungen" and "Parsifal", he abolished the distinction between aria and recitative in favour of a seamless flow of "endless melody". Wagner also brought a new philosophical dimension to opera in his works, which were usually based on stories from Germanic or Arthurian legend. Finally, Wagner built his own opera house at Bayreuth with part of the patronage from Ludwig II of Bavaria, exclusively dedicated to performing his own works in the style he wanted.


title: Opera

text: Opera would never be the same after Wagner and for many composers his legacy proved a heavy burden. On the other hand, Richard Strauss accepted Wagnerian ideas but took them in wholly new directions, along with incorporating the new form introduced by Verdi. He first won fame with the scandalous "Salome" and the dark tragedy "Elektra", in which tonality was pushed to the limits. Then Strauss changed tack in his greatest success, "Der Rosenkavalier", where Mozart and Viennese waltzes became as important an influence as Wagner. Strauss continued to produce a highly varied body of operatic works, often with libretti by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Other composers who made individual contributions to German opera in the early 20th century include Alexander von Zemlinsky, Erich Korngold, Franz Schreker, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill and the Italian-born Ferruccio Busoni. The operatic innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and his successors are discussed in the section on modernism.


title: Opera

text: During the late 19th century, the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II, an admirer of the French-language operettas composed by Jacques Offenbach, composed several German-language operettas, the most famous of which was "Die Fledermaus". Nevertheless, rather than copying the style of Offenbach, the operettas of Strauss II had distinctly Viennese flavor to them.


title: Opera

text: In rivalry with imported Italian opera productions, a separate French tradition was founded by the Italian-born French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of King Louis XIV. Despite his foreign birthplace, Lully established an Academy of Music and monopolised French opera from 1672. Starting with "Cadmus et Hermione", Lully and his librettist Quinault created "tragédie en musique", a form in which dance music and choral writing were particularly prominent. Lully's operas also show a concern for expressive recitative which matched the contours of the French language. In the 18th century, Lully's most important successor was Jean-Philippe Rameau, who composed five "tragédies en musique" as well as numerous works in other genres such as "opéra-ballet", all notable for their rich orchestration and harmonic daring. Despite the popularity of Italian opera seria throughout much of Europe during the Baroque period, Italian opera never gained much of a foothold in France, where its own national operatic tradition was more popular instead. After Rameau's death, the German Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for the Parisian stage in the 1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with greater focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the 18th century another genre was gaining popularity in France: "opéra comique". This was the equivalent of the German singspiel, where arias alternated with spoken dialogue. Notable examples in this style were produced by Monsigny, Philidor and, above all, Grétry. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, composers such as Étienne Méhul, Luigi Cherubini and Gaspare Spontini, who were followers of Gluck, brought a new seriousness to the genre, which had never been wholly "comic" in any case. Another phenomenon of this period was the 'propaganda opera' celebrating revolutionary successes, e.g. Gossec's "Le triomphe de la République" (1793).


title: Opera

text: By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for Italian bel canto, especially after the arrival of Rossini in Paris. Rossini's "Guillaume Tell" helped found the new genre of grand opera, a form whose most famous exponent was another foreigner, Giacomo Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer's works, such as "Les Huguenots", emphasised virtuoso singing and extraordinary stage effects. Lighter "opéra comique" also enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boïeldieu, Auber, Hérold and Adam. In this climate, the operas of the French-born composer Hector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing. Berlioz's epic masterpiece "Les Troyens", the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a full performance for almost a hundred years.


title: Opera

text: In the second half of the 19th century, Jacques Offenbach created operetta with witty and cynical works such as "Orphée aux enfers", as well as the opera "Les Contes d'Hoffmann"; Charles Gounod scored a massive success with "Faust"; and Georges Bizet composed "Carmen", which, once audiences learned to accept its blend of Romanticism and realism, became the most popular of all opéra comiques. Jules Massenet, Camille Saint-Saëns and Léo Delibes all composed works which are still part of the standard repertory, examples being Massenet's "Manon", Saint-Saëns' "Samson et Dalila" and Delibes' "Lakmé". Their operas formed another genre, the Opera Lyrique, combined opera comique and grand opera. It is less grandiose than grand opera, but without the spoken dialogue of opera comique. At the same time, the influence of Richard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition. Many French critics angrily rejected Wagner's music dramas while many French composers closely imitated them with variable success. Perhaps the most interesting response came from Claude Debussy. As in Wagner's works, the orchestra plays a leading role in Debussy's unique opera "Pelléas et Mélisande" (1902) and there are no real arias, only recitative. But the drama is understated, enigmatic and completely un-Wagnerian.


title: Opera

text: Other notable 20th-century names include Ravel, Dukas, Roussel, Honegger and Milhaud. Francis Poulenc is one of the very few post-war composers of any nationality whose operas (which include "Dialogues des Carmélites") have gained a foothold in the international repertory. Olivier Messiaen's lengthy sacred drama "Saint François d'Assise" (1983) has also attracted widespread attention.


title: Opera

text: In England, opera's antecedent was the 17th-century "jig". This was an afterpiece that came at the end of a play. It was frequently libellous and scandalous and consisted in the main of dialogue set to music arranged from popular tunes. In this respect, jigs anticipate the ballad operas of the 18th century. At the same time, the French masque was gaining a firm hold at the English Court, with even more lavish splendour and highly realistic scenery than had been seen before. Inigo Jones became the quintessential designer of these productions, and this style was to dominate the English stage for three centuries. These masques contained songs and dances. In Ben Jonson's "Lovers Made Men" (1617), "the whole masque was sung after the Italian manner, stilo recitativo". The approach of the English Commonwealth closed theatres and halted any developments that may have led to the establishment of English opera. However, in 1656, the dramatist Sir William Davenant produced "The Siege of Rhodes". Since his theatre was not licensed to produce drama, he asked several of the leading composers (Lawes, Cooke, Locke, Coleman and Hudson) to set sections of it to music. This success was followed by "The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru" (1658) and "The History of Sir Francis Drake" (1659). These pieces were encouraged by Oliver Cromwell because they were critical of Spain. With the English Restoration, foreign (especially French) musicians were welcomed back. In 1673, Thomas Shadwell's "Psyche", patterned on the 1671 'comédie-ballet' of the same name produced by Molière and Jean-Baptiste Lully. William Davenant produced "The Tempest" in the same year, which was the first musical adaption of a Shakespeare play (composed by Locke and Johnson). About 1683, John Blow composed "Venus and Adonis", often thought of as the first true English-language opera.


title: Opera

text: Blow's immediate successor was the better known Henry Purcell. Despite the success of his masterwork "Dido and Aeneas" (1689), in which the action is furthered by the use of Italian-style recitative, much of Purcell's best work was not involved in the composing of typical opera, but instead, he usually worked within the constraints of the semi-opera format, where isolated scenes and masques are contained within the structure of a spoken play, such as Shakespeare in Purcell's "The Fairy-Queen" (1692) and Beaumont and Fletcher in "The Prophetess" (1690) and "Bonduca" (1696). The main characters of the play tend not to be involved in the musical scenes, which means that Purcell was rarely able to develop his characters through song. Despite these hindrances, his aim (and that of his collaborator John Dryden) was to establish serious opera in England, but these hopes ended with Purcell's early death at the age of 36.


title: Opera

text: Following Purcell, the popularity of opera in England dwindled for several decades. A revived interest in opera occurred in the 1730s which is largely attributed to Thomas Arne, both for his own compositions and for alerting Handel to the commercial possibilities of large-scale works in English. Arne was the first English composer to experiment with Italian-style all-sung comic opera, with his greatest success being "Thomas and Sally" in 1760. His opera "Artaxerxes" (1762) was the first attempt to set a full-blown opera seria in English and was a huge success, holding the stage until the 1830s. Although Arne imitated many elements of Italian opera, he was perhaps the only English composer at that time who was able to move beyond the Italian influences and create his own unique and distinctly English voice. His modernized ballad opera, "Love in a Village" (1762), began a vogue for pastiche opera that lasted well into the 19th century. Charles Burney wrote that Arne introduced "a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English composers had either pillaged or imitated".


title: Opera

text: Besides Arne, the other dominating force in English opera at this time was George Frideric Handel, whose "opera serias" filled the London operatic stages for decades and influenced most home-grown composers, like John Frederick Lampe, who wrote using Italian models. This situation continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including in the work of Michael William Balfe, and the operas of the great Italian composers, as well as those of Mozart, Beethoven, and Meyerbeer, continued to dominate the musical stage in England.


title: Opera

text: The only exceptions were ballad operas, such as John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" (1728), musical burlesques, European operettas, and late Victorian era light operas, notably the Savoy Operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, all of which types of musical entertainments frequently spoofed operatic conventions. Sullivan wrote only one grand opera, "Ivanhoe" (following the efforts of a number of young English composers beginning about 1876), but he claimed that even his light operas constituted part of a school of "English" opera, intended to supplant the French operettas (usually performed in bad translations) that had dominated the London stage from the mid-19th century into the 1870s. London's "Daily Telegraph" agreed, describing "The Yeomen of the Guard" as "a genuine English opera, forerunner of many others, let us hope, and possibly significant of an advance towards a national lyric stage". Sullivan produced a few light operas in the 1890s that were of a more serious nature than those in the G&S series, including "Haddon Hall" and "The Beauty Stone", but "Ivanhoe" (which ran for 155 consecutive performances, using alternating casts—a record until Broadway's "La bohème") survives as his only grand opera.


title: Opera

text: In the 20th century, English opera began to assert more independence, with works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and in particular Benjamin Britten, who in a series of works that remain in standard repertory today, revealed an excellent flair for the dramatic and superb musicality. More recently Sir Harrison Birtwistle has emerged as one of Britain's most significant contemporary composers from his first opera "Punch and Judy" to his most recent critical success in The Minotaur. In the first decade of the 21st century, the librettist of an early Birtwistle opera, Michael Nyman, has been focusing on composing operas, including "Facing Goya", "", and "Love Counts". Today composers such as Thomas Adès continue to export English opera abroad.


title: Opera

text: Also in the 20th century, American composers like George Gershwin ("Porgy and Bess"), Scott Joplin ("Treemonisha"), Leonard Bernstein ("Candide"), Gian Carlo Menotti, Douglas Moore, and Carlisle Floyd began to contribute English-language operas infused with touches of popular musical styles. They were followed by composers such as Philip Glass ("Einstein on the Beach"), Mark Adamo, John Corigliano ("The Ghosts of Versailles"), Robert Moran, John Adams ("Nixon in China"), André Previn and Jake Heggie. Many contemporary 21st century opera composers have emerged such as Missy Mazzoli, Kevin Puts, Tom Cipullo, Huang Ruo, David T. Little, Terence Blanchard, Jennifer Higdon, Tobias Picker, Michael Ching, and Ricky Ian Gordon.


title: Opera

text: Opera was brought to Russia in the 1730s by the Italian operatic troupes and soon it became an important part of entertainment for the Russian Imperial Court and aristocracy. Many foreign composers such as Baldassare Galuppi, Giovanni Paisiello, Giuseppe Sarti, and Domenico Cimarosa (as well as various others) were invited to Russia to compose new operas, mostly in the Italian language. Simultaneously some domestic musicians like Maksym Berezovsky and Dmitry Bortniansky were sent abroad to learn to write operas. The first opera written in Russian was "Tsefal i Prokris" by the Italian composer Francesco Araja (1755). The development of Russian-language opera was supported by the Russian composers Vasily Pashkevich, Yevstigney Fomin and Alexey Verstovsky.


title: Opera

text: However, the real birth of Russian opera came with Mikhail Glinka and his two great operas "A Life for the Tsar" (1836) and "Ruslan and Lyudmila" (1842). After him, during the 19th century in Russia, there were written such operatic masterpieces as "Rusalka" and "The Stone Guest" by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, "Boris Godunov" and "Khovanshchina" by Modest Mussorgsky, "Prince Igor" by Alexander Borodin, "Eugene Onegin" and "The Queen of Spades" by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and "The Snow Maiden" and "Sadko" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. These developments mirrored the growth of Russian nationalism across the artistic spectrum, as part of the more general Slavophilism movement.


title: Opera

text: In the 20th century, the traditions of Russian opera were developed by many composers including Sergei Rachmaninoff in his works "The Miserly Knight" and "Francesca da Rimini", Igor Stravinsky in "Le Rossignol", "Mavra", "Oedipus rex", and "The Rake's Progress", Sergei Prokofiev in "The Gambler", "The Love for Three Oranges", "The Fiery Angel", "Betrothal in a Monastery", and "War and Peace"; as well as Dmitri Shostakovich in "The Nose" and "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", Edison Denisov in "L'écume des jours", and Alfred Schnittke in "Life with an Idiot" and "Historia von D. Johann Fausten".


title: Opera

text: Czech composers also developed a thriving national opera movement of their own in the 19th century, starting with Bedřich Smetana, who wrote eight operas including the internationally popular "The Bartered Bride". Smetana's eight operas created the bedrock of the Czech opera repertory, but of these only "The Bartered Bride" is performed regularly outside the composer's homeland. After reaching Vienna in 1892 and London in 1895 it rapidly became part of the repertory of every major opera company worldwide.


title: Opera

text: Antonín Dvořák's nine operas, except his first, have librettos in Czech and were intended to convey the Czech national spirit, as were some of his choral works. By far the most successful of the operas is "Rusalka" which contains the well-known aria "Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém" ("Song to the Moon"); it is played on contemporary opera stages frequently outside the Czech Republic. This is attributable to their uneven invention and libretti, and perhaps also their staging requirements – "The Jacobin", "Armida", "Vanda" and "Dimitrij" need stages large enough to portray invading armies.


title: Opera

text: Leoš Janáček gained international recognition in the 20th century for his innovative works. His later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera "Jenůfa", which was premiered in 1904 in Brno. The success of "Jenůfa" (often called the "Moravian national opera") at Prague in 1916 gave Janáček access to the world's great opera stages. Janáček's later works are his most celebrated. They include operas such as "Káťa Kabanová" and "The Cunning Little Vixen", the Sinfonietta and the "Glagolitic Mass".


title: Opera

text: Spain also produced its own distinctive form of opera, known as zarzuela, which had two separate flowerings: one from the mid-17th century through the mid-18th century, and another beginning around 1850. During the late 18th century up until the mid-19th century, Italian opera was immensely popular in Spain, supplanting the native form.


title: Opera

text: In Russian Eastern Europe, several national operas began to emerge. Ukrainian opera was developed by Semen Hulak-Artemovsky (1813–1873) whose most famous work "Zaporozhets za Dunayem" (A Cossack Beyond the Danube) is regularly performed around the world. Other Ukrainian opera composers include Mykola Lysenko ("Taras Bulba" and "Natalka Poltavka"), Heorhiy Maiboroda, and Yuliy Meitus. At the turn of the century, a distinct national opera movement also began to emerge in Georgia under the leadership Zacharia Paliashvili, who fused local folk songs and stories with 19th-century Romantic classical themes.


title: Opera

text: The key figure of Hungarian national opera in the 19th century was Ferenc Erkel, whose works mostly dealt with historical themes. Among his most often performed operas are "Hunyadi László" and "Bánk bán". The most famous modern Hungarian opera is Béla Bartók's "Duke Bluebeard's Castle".


title: Opera

text: Stanisław Moniuszko's opera "Straszny Dwór" (in English "The Haunted Manor") (1861–64) represents a nineteenth-century peak of Polish national opera. In the 20th century, other operas created by Polish composers included "King Roger" by Karol Szymanowski and "Ubu Rex" by Krzysztof Penderecki.


title: Opera

text: The first known opera from Turkey (the Ottoman Empire) was "Arshak II", which was an Armenian opera composed by an ethnic Armenian composer Tigran Chukhajian in 1868 and partially performed in 1873. It was fully staged in 1945 in Armenia.


title: Opera

text: The first years of the Soviet Union saw the emergence of new national operas, such as the "Koroğlu" (1937) by the Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov. The first Kyrgyz opera, "Ai-Churek", premiered in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre on 26 May 1939, during Kyrgyz Art Decade. It was composed by Vladimir Vlasov, Abdylas Maldybaev and Vladimir Fere. The libretto was written by Joomart Bokonbaev, Jusup Turusbekov, and Kybanychbek Malikov. The opera is based on the Kyrgyz heroic epic "Manas".


title: Opera

text: In Iran, opera gained more attention after the introduction of Western classical music in the late 19th century. However, it took until mid 20th century for Iranian composers to start experiencing with the field, especially as the construction of the Roudaki Hall in 1967, made possible staging of a large variety of works for stage. Perhaps, the most famous Iranian opera is Rostam and Sohrab by Loris Tjeknavorian premiered not until the early 2000s.


title: Opera

text: Chinese contemporary classical opera, a Chinese language form of Western style opera that is distinct from traditional Chinese opera, has had operas dating back to "The White Haired Girl" in 1945.


title: Opera

text: In Latin America, opera started as a result of European colonisation. The first opera ever written in the Americas was "La púrpura de la rosa", by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, although "Partenope", by the Mexican Manuel de Zumaya, was the first opera written from a composer born in Latin America (music now lost). The first Brazilian opera for a libretto in Portuguese was "A Noite de São João", by Elias Álvares Lobo. However, Antônio Carlos Gomes is generally regarded as the most outstanding Brazilian composer, having a relative success in Italy with its Brazilian-themed operas with Italian librettos, such as "Il Guarany". Opera in Argentina developed in the 20th century after the inauguration of Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires—with the opera "Aurora", by Ettore Panizza, being heavily influenced by the Italian tradition, due to immigration. Other important composers from Argentina include Felipe Boero and Alberto Ginastera.


title: Opera

text: Perhaps the most obvious stylistic manifestation of modernism in opera is the development of atonality. The move away from traditional tonality in opera had begun with Richard Wagner, and in particular the Tristan chord. Composers such as Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Giacomo Puccini, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten and Hans Pfitzner pushed Wagnerian harmony further with a more extreme use of chromaticism and greater use of dissonance. Another aspect of modernist opera is the shift away from long, suspended melodies, to short quick mottos, as first illustrated by Giuseppe Verdi in his "Falstaff". Composers such as Strauss, Britten, Shostakovich and Stravinsky adopted and expanded upon this style.


title: Opera

text: Operatic modernism truly began in the operas of two Viennese composers, Arnold Schoenberg and his student Alban Berg, both composers and advocates of atonality and its later development (as worked out by Schoenberg), dodecaphony. Schoenberg's early musico-dramatic works, "Erwartung" (1909, premiered in 1924) and "Die glückliche Hand" display heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance in general. Schoenberg also occasionally used Sprechstimme.


title: Opera

text: The two operas of Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg, "Wozzeck" (1925) and "Lulu" (incomplete at his death in 1935) share many of the same characteristics as described above, though Berg combined his highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique with melodic passages of a more traditionally tonal nature (quite Mahlerian in character) which perhaps partially explains why his operas have remained in standard repertory, despite their controversial music and plots. Schoenberg's theories have influenced (either directly or indirectly) significant numbers of opera composers ever since, even if they themselves did not compose using his techniques.


title: Opera

text: Composers thus influenced include the Englishman Benjamin Britten, the German Hans Werner Henze, and the Russian Dmitri Shostakovich. (Philip Glass also makes use of atonality, though his style is generally described as minimalist, usually thought of as another 20th-century development.)


title: Opera

text: However, operatic modernism's use of atonality also sparked a backlash in the form of neoclassicism. An early leader of this movement was Ferruccio Busoni, who in 1913 wrote the libretto for his neoclassical number opera "Arlecchino" (first performed in 1917). Also among the vanguard was the Russian Igor Stravinsky. After composing music for the Diaghilev-produced ballets "Petrushka" (1911) and "The Rite of Spring" (1913), Stravinsky turned to neoclassicism, a development culminating in his opera-oratorio "Oedipus Rex" (1927). Stravinsky had already turned away from the modernist trends of his early ballets to produce small-scale works that do not fully qualify as opera, yet certainly contain many operatic elements, including "Renard" (1916: "a burlesque in song and dance") and "The Soldier's Tale" (1918: "to be read, played, and danced"; in both cases the descriptions and instructions are those of the composer). In the latter, the actors declaim portions of speech to a specified rhythm over instrumental accompaniment, peculiarly similar to the older German genre of "Melodrama". Well after his Rimsky-Korsakov-inspired works "The Nightingale" (1914), and "Mavra" (1922), Stravinsky continued to ignore serialist technique and eventually wrote a full-fledged 18th-century-style diatonic number opera "The Rake's Progress" (1951). His resistance to serialism (an attitude he reversed following Schoenberg's death) proved to be an inspiration for many other composers.


title: Opera

text: A common trend throughout the 20th century, in both opera and general orchestral repertoire, is the use of smaller orchestras as a cost-cutting measure; the grand Romantic-era orchestras with huge string sections, multiple harps, extra horns, and exotic percussion instruments were no longer feasible. As government and private patronage of the arts decreased throughout the 20th century, new works were often commissioned and performed with smaller budgets, very often resulting in chamber-sized works, and short, one-act operas. Many of Benjamin Britten's operas are scored for as few as 13 instrumentalists; Mark Adamo's two-act realization of "Little Women" is scored for 18 instrumentalists.


title: Opera

text: Another feature of late 20th-century opera is the emergence of contemporary historical operas, in contrast to the tradition of basing operas on more distant history, the re-telling of contemporary fictional stories or plays, or on myth or legend. "The Death of Klinghoffer", "Nixon in China", and "Doctor Atomic" by John Adams, "Dead Man Walking" by Jake Heggie, and "Anna Nicole" by Mark-Anthony Turnage exemplify the dramatisation onstage of events in recent living memory, where characters portrayed in the opera were alive at the time of the premiere performance.


title: Opera

text: The Metropolitan Opera in the US (often known as the Met) reported in 2011 that the average age of its audience was 60. Many opera companies attempted to attract a younger audience to halt the larger trend of greying audiences for classical music since the last decades of the 20th century. Efforts resulted in lowering the average age of the Met's audience to 58 in 2018, the average age at Berlin State Opera was reported as 54, and Paris Opera reported an average age of 48. "New York Times" critic Anthony Tommasini has suggested that "companies inordinately beholden to standard repertory" are not reaching younger, more curious audiences.


title: Opera

text: Smaller companies in the US have a more fragile existence, and they usually depend on a "patchwork quilt" of support from state and local governments, local businesses, and fundraisers. Nevertheless, some smaller companies have found ways of drawing new audiences. In addition to radio and television broadcasts of opera performances, which have had some success in gaining new audiences, broadcasts of live performances to movie theatres have shown the potential to reach new audiences.


title: Opera

text: By the late 1930s, some musicals began to be written with a more operatic structure. These works include complex polyphonic ensembles and reflect musical developments of their times. "Porgy and Bess" (1935), influenced by jazz styles, and "Candide" (1956), with its sweeping, lyrical passages and farcical parodies of opera, both opened on Broadway but became accepted as part of the opera repertory. Popular musicals such as "Show Boat", "West Side Story", "Brigadoon", "", "Passion", "Evita", "The Light in the Piazza", "The Phantom of the Opera" and others tell dramatic stories through complex music and in the 2010s they are sometimes seen in opera houses. "The Most Happy Fella" (1952) is quasi-operatic and has been revived by the New York City Opera. Other rock-influenced musicals, such as "Tommy" (1969) and "Jesus Christ Superstar" (1971), "Les Misérables" (1980), "Rent" (1996), "Spring Awakening" (2006), and "Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812" (2012) employ various operatic conventions, such as through composition, recitative instead of dialogue, and leitmotifs.


title: Opera

text: A subtle type of sound electronic reinforcement called acoustic enhancement is used in some modern concert halls and theatres where operas are performed. Although none of the major opera houses "...use traditional, Broadway-style sound reinforcement, in which most if not all singers are equipped with radio microphones mixed to a series of unsightly loudspeakers scattered throughout the theatre", many use a sound reinforcement system for acoustic enhancement and for subtle boosting of offstage voices, child singers, onstage dialogue, and sound effects (e.g., church bells in "Tosca" or thunder effects in Wagnerian operas).


title: Opera

text: Operatic vocal technique evolved, in a time before electronic amplification, to allow singers to produce enough volume to be heard over an orchestra, without the instrumentalists having to substantially compromise their volume.


title: Opera

text: Singers and the roles they play are classified by voice type, based on the tessitura, agility, power and timbre of their voices. Male singers can be classified by vocal range as bass, bass-baritone, baritone, baritenor, tenor and countertenor, and female singers as contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano. (Men sometimes sing in the "female" vocal ranges, in which case they are termed sopranist or countertenor. The countertenor is commonly encountered in opera, sometimes singing parts written for castrati—men neutered at a young age specifically to give them a higher singing range.) Singers are then further classified by size—for instance, a soprano can be described as a lyric soprano, coloratura, soubrette, spinto, or dramatic soprano. These terms, although not fully describing a singing voice, associate the singer's voice with the roles most suitable to the singer's vocal characteristics.


title: Opera

text: Yet another sub-classification can be made according to acting skills or requirements, for example the "basso buffo" who often must be a specialist in patter as well as a comic actor. This is carried out in detail in the "Fach" system of German speaking countries, where historically opera and spoken drama were often put on by the same repertory company.


title: Opera

text: A particular singer's voice may change drastically over his or her lifetime, rarely reaching vocal maturity until the third decade, and sometimes not until middle age. Two French voice types, "premiere dugazon" and "deuxieme dugazon", were named after successive stages in the career of Louise-Rosalie Lefebvre (Mme. Dugazon). Other terms originating in the star casting system of the Parisian theatres are "baryton-martin" and soprano "falcon".


title: Opera

text: The soprano voice has typically been used as the voice of choice for the female protagonist of the opera since the latter half of the 18th century. Earlier, it was common for that part to be sung by any female voice, or even a castrato. The current emphasis on a wide vocal range was primarily an invention of the Classical period. Before that, the vocal virtuosity, not range, was the priority, with soprano parts rarely extending above a high A (Handel, for example, only wrote one role extending to a high C), though the castrato Farinelli was alleged to possess a top D (his lower range was also extraordinary, extending to tenor C). The mezzo-soprano, a term of comparatively recent origin, also has a large repertoire, ranging from the female lead in Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" to such heavyweight roles as Brangäne in Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" (these are both roles sometimes sung by sopranos; there is quite a lot of movement between these two voice-types). For the true contralto, the range of parts is more limited, which has given rise to the insider joke that contraltos only sing "witches, bitches, and britches" roles. In recent years many of the "trouser roles" from the Baroque era, originally written for women, and those originally sung by castrati, have been reassigned to countertenors.


title: Opera

text: The tenor voice, from the Classical era onwards, has traditionally been assigned the role of male protagonist. Many of the most challenging tenor roles in the repertory were written during the "bel canto" era, such as Donizetti's sequence of 9 Cs above middle C during "La fille du régiment". With Wagner came an emphasis on vocal heft for his protagonist roles, with this vocal category described as "Heldentenor"; this heroic voice had its more Italianate counterpart in such roles as Calaf in Puccini's "Turandot". Basses have a long history in opera, having been used in "opera seria" in supporting roles, and sometimes for comic relief (as well as providing a contrast to the preponderance of high voices in this genre). The bass repertoire is wide and varied, stretching from the comedy of Leporello in "Don Giovanni" to the nobility of Wotan in Wagner's "Ring Cycle," to the conflicted King Phillip of Verdi's "Don Carlos". In between the bass and the tenor is the baritone, which also varies in weight from say, Guglielmo in Mozart's "Così fan tutte" to Posa in Verdi's "Don Carlos"; the actual designation "baritone" was not standard until the mid-19th century.


title: Opera

text: Early performances of opera were too infrequent for singers to make a living exclusively from the style, but with the birth of commercial opera in the mid-17th century, professional performers began to emerge. The role of the male hero was usually entrusted to a castrato, and by the 18th century, when Italian opera was performed throughout Europe, leading castrati who possessed extraordinary vocal virtuosity, such as Senesino and Farinelli, became international stars. The career of the first major female star (or prima donna), Anna Renzi, dates to the mid-17th century. In the 18th century, a number of Italian sopranos gained international renown and often engaged in fierce rivalry, as was the case with Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, who started a fistfight with one another during a performance of a Handel opera. The French disliked castrati, preferring their male heroes to be sung by an haute-contre (a high tenor), of which Joseph Legros (1739–1793) was a leading example.


title: Opera

text: Though opera patronage has decreased in the last century in favor of other arts and media (such as musicals, cinema, radio, television and recordings), mass media and the advent of recording have supported the popularity of many famous singers including Maria Callas, Enrico Caruso, Amelita Galli-Curci, Kirsten Flagstad, Mario Del Monaco, Renata Tebaldi, Risë Stevens, Alfredo Kraus, Franco Corelli, Montserrat Caballé, Joan Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson, Nellie Melba, Rosa Ponselle, Beniamino Gigli, Jussi Björling, Feodor Chaliapin, Cecilia Bartoli, Renée Fleming, Marilyn Horne, Bryn Terfel, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and The Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras).


title: Opera

text: Before the 1700s, Italian operas used a small string orchestra, but it rarely played to accompany the singers. Opera solos during this period were accompanied by the basso continuo group, which consisted of the harpsichord, "plucked instruments" such as lute and a bass instrument. The string orchestra typically only played when the singer was not singing, such as during a singer's "...entrances and exits, between vocal numbers, [or] for [accompanying] dancing". Another role for the orchestra during this period was playing an orchestral ritornello to mark the end of a singer's solo. During the early 1700s, some composers began to use the string orchestra to mark certain aria or recitatives "...as special"; by 1720, most arias were accompanied by an orchestra. Opera composers such as Domenico Sarro, Leonardo Vinci, Giambattista Pergolesi, Leonardo Leo, and Johann Adolf Hasse added new instruments to the opera orchestra and gave the instruments new roles. They added wind instruments to the strings and used orchestral instruments to play instrumental solos, as a way to mark certain arias as special.


title: Opera

text: The orchestra has also provided an instrumental overture before the singers come onstage since the 1600s. Peri's "Euridice" opens with a brief instrumental ritornello, and Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" (1607) opens with a toccata, in this case a fanfare for muted trumpets. The French overture as found in Jean-Baptiste Lully's operas consist of a slow introduction in a marked "dotted rhythm", followed by a lively movement in fugato style. The overture was frequently followed by a series of dance tunes before the curtain rose. This overture style was also used in English opera, most notably in Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas". Handel also uses the French overture form in some of his Italian operas such as Giulio Cesare.


title: Opera

text: In Italy, a distinct form called "overture" arose in the 1680s, and became established particularly through the operas of Alessandro Scarlatti, and spread throughout Europe, supplanting the French form as the standard operatic overture by the mid-18th century. It uses three generally homophonic movements: fast–slow–fast. The opening movement was normally in duple metre and in a major key; the slow movement in earlier examples was short, and could be in a contrasting key; the concluding movement was dance-like, most often with rhythms of the gigue or minuet, and returned to the key of the opening section. As the form evolved, the first movement may incorporate fanfare-like elements and took on the pattern of so-called "sonatina form" (sonata form without a development section), and the slow section became more extended and lyrical.


title: Opera

text: In Italian opera after about 1800, the "overture" became known as the "sinfonia". Fisher also notes the term "Sinfonia avanti l'opera" (literally, the "symphony before the opera") was "an early term for a sinfonia used to begin an opera, that is, as an overture as opposed to one serving to begin a later section of the work". In 19th-century opera, in some operas, the overture, "Vorspiel", "Einleitung", Introduction, or whatever else it may be called, was the portion of the music which takes place before the curtain rises; a specific, rigid form was no longer required for the overture.


title: Opera

text: The role of the orchestra in accompanying the singers changed over the 19th century, as the Classical style transitioned to the Romantic era. In general, orchestras got bigger, new instruments were added, such as additional percussion instruments (e.g., bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, etc.). The orchestration of orchestra parts also developed over the 19th century. In Wagnerian operas, the forefronting of the orchestra went beyond the overture. In Wagnerian operas such as the Ring Cycle, the orchestra often played the recurrent musical themes or leitmotifs, a role which gave a prominence to the orchestra which "...elevated its status to that of a prima donna". Wagner's operas were scored with unprecedented scope and complexity, adding more brass instruments and huge ensemble sizes: indeed, his score to "Das Rheingold" calls for six harps. In Wagner and the work of subsequent composers, such as Benjamin Britten, the orchestra "often communicates facts about the story that exceed the levels of awareness of the characters therein." As a result, critics began to regard the orchestra as performing a role analogous to that of a literary narrator."


title: Opera

text: As the role of the orchestra and other instrumental ensembles changed over the history of opera, so did the role of leading the musicians. In the Baroque era, the musicians were usually directed by the harpsichord player, although the French composer Lully is known to have conducted with a long staff. In the 1800s, during the Classical period, the first violinist, also known as the concertmaster, would lead the orchestra while sitting. Over time, some directors began to stand up and use hand and arm gestures to lead the performers. Eventually this role of music director became termed the conductor, and a podium was used to make it easier for all the musicians to see him or her. By the time Wagnerian operas were introduced, the complexity of the works and the huge orchestras used to play them gave the conductor an increasingly important role. Modern opera conductors have a challenging role: they have to direct both the orchestra in the orchestra pit and the singers on stage.


title: Opera

text: Since the days of Handel and Mozart, many composers have favored Italian as the language for the libretto of their operas. From the Bel Canto era to Verdi, composers would sometimes supervise versions of their operas in both Italian and French. Because of this, operas such as "Lucia di Lammermoor" or "Don Carlos" are today deemed canonical in both their French and Italian versions.


title: Opera

text: Until the mid-1950s, it was acceptable to produce operas in translations even if these had not been authorized by the composer or the original librettists. For example, opera houses in Italy routinely staged Wagner in Italian. After World War II, opera scholarship improved, artists refocused on the original versions, and translations fell out of favor. Knowledge of European languages, especially Italian, French, and German, is today an important part of the training for professional singers. "The biggest chunk of operatic training is in linguistics and musicianship", explains mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick. "[I have to understand] not only what I'm singing, but what everyone else is singing. I sing Italian, Czech, Russian, French, German, English."


title: Opera

text: In the 1980s, supertitles (sometimes called surtitles) began to appear. Although supertitles were first almost universally condemned as a distraction, today many opera houses provide either supertitles, generally projected above the theatre's proscenium arch, or individual seat screens where spectators can choose from more than one language. TV broadcasts typically include subtitles even if intended for an audience who knows well the language (for example, a RAI broadcast of an Italian opera). These subtitles target not only the hard of hearing but the audience generally, since a sung discourse is much harder to understand than a spoken one—even in the ears of native speakers. Subtitles in one or more languages have become standard in opera broadcasts, simulcasts, and DVD editions.


title: Opera

text: Today, operas are only rarely performed in translation. Exceptions include the English National Opera, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, and Opera South East, which favor English translations. Another exception are opera productions intended for a young audience, such as Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel" and some productions of Mozart's "The Magic Flute".


title: Opera

text: Outside the US, and especially in Europe, most opera houses receive public subsidies from taxpayers. In Milan, Italy, 60% of La Scala's annual budget of €115 million is from ticket sales and private donations, with the remaining 40% coming from public funds. In 2005, La Scala received 25% of Italy's total state subsidy of €464 million for the performing arts. In the UK, Arts Council England provides funds to Opera North, the Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera, and English National Opera. Between 2012 and 2015, these four opera companies along with the English National Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Northern Ballet accounted for 22% of the funds in the Arts Council's national portfolio. During that period, the Council undertook an analysis of its funding for large-scale opera and ballet companies, setting recommendations and targets for the companies to meet prior to the 2015–2018 funding decisions. In February 2015, concerns over English National Opera's business plan led to the Arts Council placing it "under special funding arrangements" in what "The Independent" termed "the unprecedented step" of threatening to withdraw public funding if the council's concerns were not met by 2017. European public funding to opera has led to a disparity between the number of year-round opera houses in Europe and the United States. For example, "Germany has about 80 year-round opera houses [as of 2004], while the U.S., with more than three times the population, does not have any. Even the Met only has a seven-month season."


title: Opera

text: A milestone for opera broadcasting in the U.S. was achieved on 24 December 1951, with the live broadcast of "Amahl and the Night Visitors", an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti. It was the first opera specifically composed for television in America. Another milestone occurred in Italy in 1992 when "Tosca" was broadcast live from its original Roman settings and times of the day: the first act came from the 16th-century Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle at noon on Saturday; the 16th-century Palazzo Farnese was the setting for the second at 8:15 pm; and on Sunday at 6 am, the third act was broadcast from Castel Sant'Angelo. The production was transmitted via satellite to 105 countries.


title: Opera

text: Major opera companies have begun presenting their performances in local cinemas throughout the United States and many other countries. The Metropolitan Opera began a series of live high-definition video transmissions to cinemas around the world in 2006. In 2007, Met performances were shown in over 424 theaters in 350 U.S. cities. "La bohème" went out to 671 screens worldwide. San Francisco Opera began prerecorded video transmissions in March 2008. As of June 2008, approximately 125 theaters in 117 U.S. cities carry the showings. The HD video opera transmissions are presented via the same HD digital cinema projectors used for major Hollywood films. European opera houses and festivals including the Royal Opera in London, La Scala in Milan, the Salzburg Festival, La Fenice in Venice, and the Maggio Musicale in Florence have also transmitted their productions to theaters in cities around the world since 2006, including 90 cities in the U.S.


title: Opera

text: The emergence of the Internet has also affected the way in which audiences consume opera. In 2009 the British Glyndebourne Festival Opera offered for the first time an online digital video download of its complete 2007 production of "Tristan und Isolde". In the 2013 season, the festival streamed all six of its productions online. In July 2012, the first online community opera was premiered at the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Titled "Free Will", it was created by members of the Internet group Opera By You. Its 400 members from 43 countries wrote the libretto, composed the music, and designed the sets and costumes using the Wreckamovie web platform. Savonlinna Opera Festival provided professional soloists, an 80-member choir, a symphony orchestra, and the stage machinery. It was performed live at the festival and streamed live on the internet.


title: Bokeh

text: In photography, bokeh ( or ; ) is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in out-of-focus parts of an image. Bokeh has also been defined as "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light". Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause very different bokeh effects. Some lens designs blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce distracting or unpleasant blurring ("good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively). Photographers may deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions, accentuating their lens's bokeh.


title: Bokeh

text: Bokeh is often most visible around small background highlights, such as specular reflections and light sources, which is why it is often associated with such areas. However, bokeh is not limited to highlights; blur occurs in all regions of an image which are outside the depth of field.


title: Bokeh

text: The opposite of bokeh—an image in which multiple distances are visible and all are in focus—is deep focus.


title: Bokeh

text: The term comes from the Japanese word , which means "blur" or "haze", resulting in , the "blur quality". This is derived as a noun form of the verb , which is written in several ways, with additional meanings and nuances: refers to being blurry, hazy or out-of-focus, whereas the and spellings refer to being mentally hazy, befuddled, childish, senile, or playing stupid. (literally, "time difference fog") is the term for jet lag. is a verb denoting the actions or condition of someone who is half-asleep, or nodding off. means playing dumb, and refers to a poker face. The related term means intentional blurring or gradation; that is a noun form of the transitive verb , which means to make something blurry, rather than to be blurry.


title: Bokeh

text: The English spelling "bokeh" was popularized in 1997 in "Photo Techniques" magazine, when Mike Johnston, the editor at the time, commissioned three papers on the topic for the May/June 1997 issue; he altered the spelling to suggest the correct pronunciation to English speakers, saying "it is properly pronounced with bo as in bone and ke as in Kenneth, with equal stress on either syllable".


title: Bokeh

text: The spellings "bokeh" and "boke" have both been in use since at least 1996, when Merklinger had suggested "or Bokeh if you prefer." The term "bokeh" has appeared in photography books as early as 1998.


title: Bokeh

text: Though difficult to quantify, some lenses have subjectively more pleasing out-of-focus areas. "Good" bokeh is especially important for macro lenses and long telephoto lenses, because they are typically used in situations that produce shallow depth of field. Good bokeh is also important for medium telephoto lenses (typically 85–150 mm on 35 mm format). When used in portrait photography (for their "natural" perspective), the photographer usually wants a shallow depth of field, so that the subject stands out sharply against a blurred background.


title: Bokeh

text: Bokeh characteristics may be quantified by examining the image's circle of confusion. In out-of-focus areas, each point of light becomes an image of the aperture, generally a more or less round disc. Depending on how a lens is corrected for spherical aberration, the disc may be uniformly illuminated, brighter near the edge, or brighter near the center. A well-known lens that exhibited the latter "soap-bubble" characteristic was that produced by Hugo Meyer & Co., more recently revived by Meyer Optik Görlitz.


title: Bokeh

text: Lenses that are poorly corrected for spherical aberration will show one kind of disc for out-of-focus points in front of the plane of focus, and a different kind for points behind. This may actually be desirable, as blur circles that are dimmer near the edges produce less-defined shapes which blend smoothly with the surrounding image.


title: Bokeh

text: The shape of the aperture has an influence on the subjective quality of bokeh as well. For conventional lens designs (with bladed apertures), when a lens is stopped down smaller than its maximum aperture size (minimum f-number), out-of-focus points are blurred into the polygonal shape formed by the aperture blades. This is most apparent when a lens produces hard-edged bokeh. For this reason, some lenses have many aperture blades and/or blades with curved edges to make the aperture more closely approximate a circle rather than a polygon. Minolta has been on the forefront of promoting and introducing lenses with near-ideal circular apertures since 1987, but most other manufacturers now offer lenses with shape-optimized diaphragms, at least for the domain of portraiture photography. In contrast, a catadioptric telephoto lens renders bokehs resembling doughnuts, because its secondary mirror blocks the central part of the aperture opening. Recently, photographers have exploited the shape of the bokeh by creating a simple mask out of card with shapes such as hearts or stars, that the photographer wishes the bokeh to be, and placing it over the lens.


title: Bokeh

text: Lenses with 11, 12, or 15 blade iris diaphragms are often claimed to excel in bokeh quality. Because of this, the lenses do not need to reach wide apertures to get better circles (instead of polygons). In the past, wide aperture lenses (f/2, f/2.8) were very expensive, due to the complex mathematical design and manufacturing know-how required, at a time when all computations and glass making were done by hand. Leica could reach a good bokeh at f/4.5. Today it is much easier to make an f/1.8 lens, and a 9-bladed lens at f/1.8 is enough for an 85mm lens to achieve great bokeh.


title: Bokeh

text: Some lens manufacturers including Nikon, Minolta, and Sony make lenses designed with specific controls to change the rendering of the out-of-focus areas.


title: Bokeh

text: The Nikon 105 mm DC-Nikkor and 135 mm DC-Nikkor lenses (DC stands for "Defocus Control") have a control ring that permits the overcorrection or undercorrection of spherical aberration to change the bokeh in front of and behind the focal plane.


title: Bokeh

text: The Minolta/Sony STF 135 mm f/2.8 [T4.5] (with STF standing for "smooth trans focus") is a lens specifically designed to produce pleasing bokeh. It is possible to choose between two diaphragms: one with 9 and another with 10 blades. An apodization filter is used to soften the aperture edges which results in a smooth defocused area with gradually fading circles. Those qualities made it the only lens of this kind on the market from its introduction in 1999 to 2014. In 2014 Fujifilm announced a lens utilizing a similar apodization filter in the Fujinon XF 56mm F1.2 R APD lens. Sony added the Sony FE 100 mm F2.8 STF GM OSS in 2017.


title: Bokeh

text: The 'Sigma YS System Focusing' 135 mm f/2.8 also has an extra manually-moved component, intended to compensate for aberration at close-focus distances. It can be re-purposed for defocus control.


title: Bokeh

text: In 2015, Meyer Optik USA Inc. launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce the Trioplan f2.9/50, a new lens based on one originally produced by Hugo Meyer & Co.; both lenses exhibit a characteristic "soap-bubble" bokeh.


title: Bokeh

text: The use of anamorphic lenses will cause bokeh to appear differently along the horizontal and vertical axes of the lens, becoming ellipsoidal compared to those in a spherical lens.


title: Bokeh

text: In 2016, Apple Inc. released the iPhone 7 Plus which can take pictures with "Portrait Mode" (a bokeh like effect). Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 has a similar effect available. Both of these phones use dual cameras to detect edges and create a "depth map" of the image, which the phone uses to blur the out-of-focus portions of the photo. Other phones, like the Google Pixel, only use a single camera and machine learning to create the depth map.


title: Bokeh

text: In 2017, Vivo released a smartphone with dual front lenses for selfies with bokeh. The first, a 20 MP lens, uses a 1/2.78" sensor with f/2.0 aperture, while the second, an 8 MP f/2.0 lens, captures depth information. Bokeh can be made with a combination of both lenses, and shots can be refocused even after they are captured, adding bokeh effects with different depths.


title: Bokeh

text: In early 2018, the Honor 9 Lite smartphone was released with quad cameras (two dual-lens). Both the front and back cameras have a 13MP main lens and a 2MP lens for capturing bokeh depth information.


title: Bokeh

text: Bokeh can be simulated by convolving the image with a kernel that corresponds to the image of an out-of-focus point source taken with a real camera. Unlike conventional convolution, this convolution has a kernel that depends on the distance of each image point and – at least in principle – has to include image points that are occluded by objects in the foreground. Also, bokeh is not just any blur. To a first approximation, defocus blur is convolution by a uniform disk, a more computationally intensive operation than the "standard" Gaussian blur; the former produces sharp circles around highlights whereas the latter is a much softer effect. Diffraction may alter the effective shape of the blur. Some graphics editors have a filter to do this, usually called "Lens Blur".


title: Bokeh

text: An alternative mechanical mechanism has been proposed for generating bokeh in small aperture cameras such as compacts or cellphone cameras, called image destabilisation, in which both the lens and sensor are moved in order to maintain focus at one focal plane, while defocusing nearby ones. This effect currently generates blur in only one axis.


title: Bokeh

text: Some advanced digital cameras have bokeh features which take several images with different apertures and focuses and then manually compose them afterward to one image. More advanced systems of bokeh use a hardware system of 2 sensors, one sensor to take photo as usual while other ones record depth information. Bokeh effect and refocusing can then be applied to an image after the photo is taken.


title: Bokeh

text: In 2009, a research group at MIT Media Lab showed that the bokeh effect can be used to make imperceptibly small barcodes, or bokodes. By using barcodes as small as 3 mm with a small lens over them, if the barcode is viewed out of focus through an ordinary camera focused at infinity, the resulting image is large enough to scan the information in the barcode.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Manchester United Football Club is an English football club based in Old Trafford, Greater Manchester. The club was formed as Newton Heath LYR Football Club, the works team of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway depot in Newton Heath, in 1878. The club split from the railway company in 1892 and remained under private ownership for almost 100 years, changing its name to Manchester United after being saved from bankruptcy in 1902. The club was the subject of takeover bids from media tycoon Robert Maxwell in 1984 and property trader Michael Knighton in 1989, before going public in 1991; they received another takeover bid from Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB corporation in 1998 before Malcolm Glazer's stake was announced in September 2003.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: By the end of 2003, Glazer had increased his shareholding from 3.17% to around 15%, which he almost doubled in the year up to October 2004. His acquisition of John Magnier and J. P. McManus's 28.7% stake in May 2005 pushed his own up to around 57%, well over the 30% threshold that would force him to launch a takeover bid. A few days later, he took control of 75% of the club's shares, allowing him to delist the company from the London Stock Exchange, and within a month, the Glazers took 98% ownership of the club via their Red Football parent company, forcing a squeeze-out of the remaining 2%. The final purchase price of the club totalled almost £800 million.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Most of the capital used by Glazer to purchase Manchester United came in the form of loans, the majority of which were secured against the club's assets, incurring interest payments of over £60 million per annum. The remainder came in the form of PIK loans (payment in kind loans), which were later sold to hedge funds. Manchester United was not liable for the PIKs, which were held by Red Football Joint Venture and were secured on that company's shares in Red Football (and thus the club). The interest on the PIKs rolled up at 14.25% per annum. Despite this, the Glazers did not pay down any of the PIK loans in the first five years they owned the club. In January 2010, the club carried out a successful £500 million bond issue, and by March 2010, the PIKs stood at around £207 million. The PIKs were eventually paid off in November 2010 by unspecified means. In August 2012, as part of further refinancing, the Glazers sold a number of shares in Manchester United in an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Some Manchester United fans opposed Glazer's takeover of the club, particularly once they realised the level of debt that the club would have to take on after having been debt-free for so many years. Disgruntled fans launched the football club F.C. United of Manchester in 2005, which entered the North West Counties Football League and played in the sixth tier National League North from 2015 to 2019. Since 2005, the Manchester United Supporters' Trust has been working on a way of returning ownership of the club to supporters; in 2010, they met with a group of wealthy Manchester United fans – dubbed the "Red Knights" – to discuss a billion-pound takeover bid. However, the bid fell through when the Red Knights refused to meet the Glazers' valuation of the club.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Manchester United was formed as Newton Heath LYR F.C. in 1878 by the workers in the Carriage and Wagon Works of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway's Newton Heath depot. In 1901, the club was in over £2,500 of debt and facing a winding-up order; however, they were saved by local brewer John Henry Davies, who changed their name to Manchester United in 1902. After Davies' death in 1927, the club fell into financial difficulties once again, but James W. Gibson stepped in as a new financial benefactor in 1931. Gibson himself died in 1951, but while his widow, Violet, inherited the ownership of the club, its control passed to director and former player Harold Hardman.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Meanwhile, a local businessman named Louis Edwards began accruing shares in Manchester United and was eventually made chairman on Hardman's death in 1965. His son, Martin Edwards, purchased a percentage of shares from Alan Gibson – son of former owner James Gibson – and became the majority shareholder and chairman when Louis Edwards died in 1980. During Martin Edwards' time as chairman, Manchester United was the subject of several takeover bids; the first came from media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who bid £10 million in February 1984, but the sale fell through before any serious talks could take place. In 1989, property magnate Michael Knighton was on the verge of completing a £20 million takeover, but his financial backers pulled out at the last minute and he had to be content with merely a seat on the board.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Manchester United was floated on the stock market in 1991, and they received yet another takeover bid in 1998, this time from Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB. The Manchester United board accepted a £623 million offer, but the takeover was blocked by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission at the final hurdle in April 1999. A few years later, a power struggle emerged between the club's manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, and his horse-racing partners, John Magnier and J. P. McManus, who had gradually become the largest shareholders via their company, Cubic Expression. In a dispute that stemmed from contested ownership of the horse Rock of Gibraltar, Magnier and McManus attempted to have Ferguson removed from his position as manager, and the board responded by approaching investors to attempt to reduce the Irishmen's influence.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Meanwhile, Avram Glazer – the son of Malcolm Glazer – was looking into investment in European football. The Glazer family already owned several businesses in the United States and had purchased the Tampa Bay Buccaneers National Football League franchise in 1995. They convinced the local government to fund a new stadium for the Buccaneers in 1998 and the franchise won its first Super Bowl in January 2003.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Following the Manchester United board's search for new investors, the Glazers purchased their first tranche of Manchester United shares on 2 March 2003, spending around £9 million on a 2.9% stake, which they purchased through a holding company called Red Football. On 26 September 2003, it was reported that they had increased their share to 3.17%, taking their shareholding above the 3% threshold that required them to inform the club's management. There had already been considerable speculation about the possibility of a takeover of the club, either by the Glazers or by one of several other interested parties. By 20 October, they had increased their shareholding to 8.93%, and on 29 November, it was reported that they owned around 15% of the club and had met David Gill, its chief executive, to discuss their intentions.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: On 12 February 2004, the Glazers increased their stake in the club to 16.31% and the following day's "Financial Times" reported that they had instructed Commerzbank to explore a takeover bid. The club's share price increased by 5% that day, valuing the club at a total of £741 million. The Glazers increased their shareholding to over 19% the following June, although they were still not the largest shareholders. Their shareholding continued to increase, nearing 30% by October 2004. Upon reaching 30%, they would have to launch a formal takeover bid. In February 2005, over 400 Manchester United fans held a protest at Old Trafford against a potential Glazer takeover.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: On 12 May 2005, Red Football announced that it had reached an agreement with shareholders J. P. McManus and John Magnier to purchase Cubic Expression's 28.7% stake in the club, which gave the Glazers a controlling stake with just under 57% of the club's shares. They then managed to secure the stake of the third-largest stakeholder, Scottish mining entrepreneur Harry Dobson, taking their share total to 62% of the club. By 13 May, the Glazers had bought a further 12.8% stake, taking their total ownership to 74.81%, just shy of the 75% threshold that would allow them to end the club's public limited company (PLC) status and delist it from the London Stock Exchange. On 16 May, the Glazers took their shareholding in Manchester United to 75.7%, and a month later, on 22 June, they removed the club's shares from the stock exchange for the first time in 14 years.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: The Glazers' shareholding increased gradually to 76.2% by 23 May, when they made their final offer of 300 pence per share, with a deadline of 3 p.m. on 13 June. On 26 May, the Manchester United board wrote to the remaining shareholders indicating their intention to sell their own shares and advising the others to follow suit; in the same letter, chairman Sir Roy Gardner and non-executive directors Ian Much and Jim O'Neill offered their resignations. On 7 June, Avram Glazer and his brothers Joel and Bryan were appointed to the Manchester United board as non-executive directors. Despite the board's encouragement, the Glazers' share in the club had only reached 97.3% by 14 June, short of the 97.6% threshold required for a compulsory buyout of all remaining shareholders, prompting them to extend the deadline on their offer to purchase the remaining shares until 27 June. A statement released on 28 June said that Red Football's shareholding had reached 98% (259,950,194 shares), prompting a squeeze-out of the remaining shareholders. The final valuation of the club was almost £790 million (approximately $1.5 billion at the exchange rate at the time).


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: On 29 June 2005, on their first visit to Old Trafford after the takeover was completed, Joel, Bryan and Avram Glazer were met with protests by around 300 Manchester United fans who opposed the club's new ownership. Around 100 members of Greater Manchester Police were called to the stadium in an attempt to quell any violence, but there were reports of missiles being thrown at the police vans and chants of "die, Glazer, die"; two people were arrested. The vice-chairman of Shareholders United, Sean Bones, declared that "the Glazer family are the enemies of Manchester United". Club director and former player Bobby Charlton issued a public apology to the Glazers for the reception they received. In further response to the takeover, a group of Manchester United supporters created a new club called F.C. United of Manchester. This so-called "phoenix club" was accepted into the North West Counties Football League second division, six promotions away from The Football League, and secured promotion in each of its first three seasons, twice as league champions.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: After the takeover, Manchester United continued to thrive, with the 2005–06 season seeing Old Trafford's capacity being expanded and a lucrative new shirt sponsorship deal signed in April 2006 with American company AIG (which had a large stake in a hedge fund company that helped to fund Glazer's takeover of the club). Increased revenue from TV rights to each competition the club participates in, as well as its various sponsorship deals, also boosted the club's profitability. This came despite fears among many supporters that the debt incurred in buying the club could lead to insolvency.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Contrary to the fears of many fans, the Glazers took action to ensure that Gill and veteran manager Sir Alex Ferguson remained at Manchester United, citing the duo's success with the club. In 2006, Malcolm Glazer's other two sons, Kevin and Edward, and his daughter, Darcie, were appointed to the Manchester United board as non-executive directors.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: The debt taken on by the Glazers to finance the takeover was split between the club and the family; between £265 million and £275 million was secured against Manchester United's assets, putting the club into debt for the first time since James Gibson saved them in 1931. This loan was provided by three New York hedge funds: Citadel, Och-Ziff Capital Management and Perry Capital. The total amount was £660 million, on which interest payments came to £62 million a year. The club stated, "The value of Manchester United has increased in the last year, which is why lenders want to invest in the club ... This move represents good housekeeping and it ensures that Sir Alex Ferguson will be provided with sufficient funds to compete in the transfer market." The Manchester United Supporters Trust responded, "'The amount of money needed to be repaid overall is huge ... The interest payment is one thing but what about the actual £660 million? It is difficult to see how these sums can be reached without significant increases in ticket prices, which, as we always suspected, means the fans will effectively be paying for someone to borrow money to own their club." Under the terms of the Glazers' refinancing, as they were unable to repay bondholders by 16 August 2010, the overall interest rate on the loans rose from 14.25% to 16.25%, resulting in annual payments of around £38 million.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: On 11 January 2010, shortly before an announcement that Red Football's debt had increased to £716.5 million ($1.17 billion), Manchester United announced their intention to refinance the debt through a bond issue worth approximately £500 million. They managed to raise £504 million in just under two weeks, meaning that they were able to pay off almost all of the £509 million owed to international banks. The bonds were issued in two tranches, one with a coupon rate of 8.75% worth £250 million, and the other with a coupon rate of 8.375% worth $425 million. The annual interest payable on the bond came to approximately £45 million per annum, with the bond due to mature on 1 February 2017. Contained within the bond prospectus were covenants that would allow the Glazers to filter large sums of money out of the club to repay the PIKs by 2015. These include the carving out of £95 million in cash, the sale and lease-back of the Trafford Training Centre at Carrington, and the ability of the Glazers to pay themselves 50% of the Consolidated Net Income of the club every year.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: In May 2010, before the final game of the season, hundreds of Manchester United fans held a protest outside Old Trafford against the Glazer ownership.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: On 16 November 2010, it was revealed that the Glazers were to pay off the remaining £220 million contained within the PIK loans by 22 November 2010. The loans were by then accruing interest at a rate of 16.25%, as the club's overall debt had exceeded its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) by more than five times. However, the club claimed that none of its own money had been put towards the repayment, raising questions as to how the Glazer family had raised the funds; suggested methods include the sale of a minority stake in the club to a third party, the sale of some or all of the family's other businesses, and – the most likely option – the refinancing of the PIKs with another loan at a lower interest rate.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: A fan campaign known as "Love United Hate Glazer" was formed following the family's bid to take over the club. The campaign involved the spreading of the slogan and the acronym "LUHG" around various locations via stickers and graffiti. A number of banners have also been displayed in the stands at Old Trafford.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Despite its restructuring, the announcement about the club's debt prompted vociferous protests from Manchester United fans on the weekend of 23 January 2010, both at Old Trafford and at the club's Carrington training facility. A protest was organised by the club's supporters groups, following up on the "Love United Hate Glazer" campaign that had existed since 2005, and encouraging match-going fans to wear green and gold, the colours of Manchester United's precursor club, Newton Heath. A few days later, on 30 January, reports emerged that the Manchester United Supporters' Trust had held meetings with a group of wealthy fans with a view to buying out the Glazers' controlling interest in the club. The group then met with Keith Harris, a Manchester United fan and the chairman of investment bank Seymour Pierce, to broker a takeover.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: On 2 March 2010, further reports emerged that the group – dubbed the "Red Knights" – had met again to discuss the possibility of a billion-pound takeover of the club. Those present at the meeting included investment bank Goldman Sachs' chief economist and former Manchester United director Jim O'Neill and lawyer Mark Rawlinson, a partner at law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, as well as Duncan Drasdo, the chief executive of the Manchester United Supporters' Trust, and Keith Harris, Executive Chairman of Seymour Pierce. The initial goal of the group was to increase the Supporters' Trust's membership to at least 100,000, to demonstrate the fans' support for a change in ownership. To better promote themselves, the Trust enlisted the services of Blue State Digital, the Internet strategy firm that worked on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election campaign.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Later that day, Manchester United announced that their gross debt for the final three months of 2009 totalled £507.5 million, a reduction of £30.6 million compared to the same period in 2008. They also reported pre-tax profits of £6.9 million, an increase of £9.6 million after making a loss of £2.7 million the previous year. This announcement was accompanied by a statement from the Glazers' spokesperson that the club was not for sale, as well as public support from David Gill, who claimed that the Glazers were "running the club the right way".


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Meanwhile, membership of the Manchester United Supporters' Trust passed the 100,000 mark on 3 March, before exceeding 125,000 a week later. The green-and-gold scarf campaign also grew, with large portions of the Old Trafford crowd showing the colours. Following Manchester United's 4–0 victory over Milan in their Champions League first knockout round tie, former Manchester United player David Beckham was seen wearing a scarf that had been thrown onto the pitch; however, he later said that he was merely showing his support for Manchester United, and that the running of the club is "not [his] business". It was also claimed that United manager Alex Ferguson would be prepared to invest his own money in the Red Knights' bid, but he dismissed these reports as "absolute rubbish".


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Given the amount of debt on Manchester United's books at the time, some analysts estimated in 2010 that any takeover bid would have had to total more than £2 billion, of which around £1.6 billion would be needed to match the Glazers' valuation of the club – double what they paid for the club in 2005. However, the Red Knights publicly stated that they would only pay "a fair price" when their takeover bid finally came. On 11 March 2010, the Red Knights appointed Nomura Securities as their advisers for their takeover bid. Nomura previously advised the Manchester United board before the Glazers' bid to buy the club. The Red Knights later admitted that they would not make a bid for the club before the end of the 2009–10 season, but it was believed that their preferred bid option would have involved retaining the £500 million bond issued by the Glazers. Two-thirds of a further £700 million would be provided by 30–40 wealthy Manchester United fans, with the remainder provided by fund-raising from ordinary fans. Once the club was secured, shares would then be offered to fans, allowing them to take ownership of the club. Despite these plans, the Red Knights put their takeover bid "on hold" in June 2010, citing "inflated valuation aspirations" in the media as the reason. Having already stated that they would only pay a "sensible" amount for the club, the group was thought to have baulked at the suggestion that the Glazers' valuation of the club was significantly higher than the amount they were willing to pay.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: In 2011, rumours surfaced that the Glazers intended to list a number of shares in Manchester United on an Asian market such as Hong Kong or Singapore, in an attempt to raise a potential £400–600 million. The Singapore flotation looked to be gaining traction in August 2011, when it emerged that the club had applied to list its shares on the Singapore Exchange; approval for the listing was given in September 2011.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: In June 2012, after several months with no further developments on the Singapore front, several sources reported that the club was considering moving its share issue to the United States, and in July 2012, an application was made for the club to sell shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), with a target of raising $100 million (£64 million). More details of the sale were released at the end of July, with the club announcing that they intended to sell 16.7 million shares (approximately 10% of the club) at between $16 and $20 each, raising up to $330 million (£210 million). Shares in the club would be divided into two groups, with Class A shares sold to the public and Class B shares retained by the Glazer family.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Ahead of the opening of the IPO, concerns were raised among both investors and Manchester United supporters regarding the details of the share offering. Although the share prospectus specified that the proceeds from the sale would go towards paying down the club's debts, it was revealed that much of the money would go directly to the Glazers. Furthermore, holders of class A shares would not be entitled to a regular dividend, and the structure of the share issue meant that the Glazers' class B shares had 10 times the voting power of class A shares, essentially denying a controlling interest in the club to anyone but the Glazers. These issues drove down interest and forced a drop in the share price from the planned $16–20 each to $14 each, representing a potential total sale value of $233 million (£150 million).


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: The shares debuted on the NYSE on 10 August 2012, and initially showed a slight rise to $14.05 per share, but closed the day back at the offer price of $14 each, valuing the club as a whole at $2.3 billion, and making it one of the most valuable sports teams in the world. One of the biggest investors in the IPO was American billionaire George Soros, whose investment company purchased about 3.1 million class A shares (1.9% of the club), valued at $40.7 million (£25.8 million) at the time. Club records announced in November 2012 revealed that gross debt had fallen to £359.7 million after the share sale paid off £62.6 million of bonds. The club's debts were further remedied in May 2013, after a new loan deal was agreed that would save the club £10 million a year in interest payments on debts now totalling around £307 million.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: In March 2014, American investment group Baron Capital purchased 24% of all of the shares available on the NYSE (equivalent to 5.8% of the entire club, but widely misreported as 2.4%). At the closing price on the day of purchase of $15.84 per share, Baron Capital's total investment was valued at $151 million (£90 million).


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: In September 2014, Baron Capital raised its stake in the club to 9.2% of the entire club (equivalent to 37.8% of all shares available on the NYSE.)


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Malcolm Glazer died on 28 May 2014 at the age of 85. His death was seen as unlikely to result in any significant changes to the operation of the club.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: From 2016, the Glazers paid themselves annual dividends from the club, at over £20 million every year from 2016 to 2020. In that same period, the club's debt repayments "all but ceased", described "The Daily Telegraph", while interest payments continued. While paying dividends was common in business, Manchester United were the sole Premier League club to "pay regular dividends of any kind", reported "The Daily Telegraph" in May 2021.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: In April 2021, Joel Glazer played a major role in controversial plans to have Manchester United compete in a European Super League. Plans were announced on 18 April and were unpopular with fans. Following the withdrawal of Manchester United from the competition three days later due to heavy backlash from fans, government, and many football players, managers and pundits, protests from fans continued. On 22 April, a group of around 20 protesters invaded the club's training ground to stage a protest against the Glazers' ownership. Two days later, more than 2,000 attended a second protest outside Old Trafford to advocate for the 50+1 rule seen in German football. Joel Glazer later apologised to the team's fans, saying "[he] got it wrong", but fans told a team executive they were "disgusted, embarrassed and angry" with his actions.


title: Glazer ownership of Manchester United

text: Ahead of a league game against Liverpool on 2 May, a second protest outside Old Trafford took place, as well as a smaller protest outside the Lowry Hotel. The Old Trafford protest this time saw over 10,000 people in attendance; around a hundred protesters gained access to the pitch. As a result of the protests, a delayed kickoff was required for the game as players and match officials were unable to get to the stadium by the original 16:30 kickoff time. After a review, the game was postponed. It was the first time a Premier League match had been postponed because of supporter protests in the competition's history. The protest gained significant news coverage. Former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher, and former Manchester United captains Gary Neville and Roy Keane, who were all providing punditry for Sky Sports ahead of the game, expressed support for the cause of the protesters.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: The Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO; , (ЕАО); , ; ) is a federal subject of Russia in the Russian Far East, bordering Khabarovsk Krai and Amur Oblast in Russia and Heilongjiang province in China. Its administrative center is the town of Birobidzhan.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: The JAO was designated by a Soviet official decree in 1928, and officially established in 1934. At its height, in the late 1940s, the Jewish population in the region peaked around 46,000–50,000, approximately 25% of the population. As of the 2010 Census, JAO's total population was 176,558 people, or 0.1% of the total population of Russia. By 2010, there were only 1,628 Jews remaining in the JAO, or fewer than 1% of the population, according to data provided by the Russian Census Bureau, while ethnic Russians made up 92.7% of the JAO population. Judaism is practiced by only 0.2% of the population of the JAO.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: Article 65 of the Constitution of Russia provides that the JAO is Russia's only autonomous oblast. It is one of two official Jewish jurisdictions in the world, the other being Israel.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: Prior to 1858, the area of what is today the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was ruled by a succession of Chinese dynasties. In 1858, the northern bank of the Amur River, including the territory of today's Jewish Autonomous Oblast, was split away from the Qing Chinese territory of Manchuria and became incorporated into the Russian Empire pursuant to the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and the Convention of Peking (1860).


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: In December 1858 the Russian government authorized the formation of the Amur Cossack Host to protect the south-east boundary of Siberia and communications on the Amur and Ussuri rivers. This military colonization included settlers from Transbaikalia. Between 1858 and 1882 many settlements consisting of wooden houses were founded. It is estimated that as many as 40,000 men from the Russian military moved into the region.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: Expeditions of scientists, including geographers, ethnographers, naturalists, and botanists such as Mikhail Ivanovich Venyukov (1832–1901), Leopold von Schrenck, Karl Maximovich, Gustav Radde (1831–1903), and Vladimir Leontyevich Komarov promoted research in the area.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: In 1899, construction began on the regional section of the Trans-Siberian Railway connecting Chita and Vladivostok. The project produced a large influx of new settlers and the foundation of new settlements. Between 1908 and 1912 stations opened at Volochayevka, Obluchye, Bira, Birakan, Londoko, In, and Tikhonkaya. The railway construction finished in October 1916 with the opening of the Khabarovsk Bridge across the Amur at Khabarovsk.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: During this time, before the 1917 revolutions, most local inhabitants were farmers. The only industrial enterprise was the Tungussky timber mill, although gold was mined in the Sutara River, and there were some small railway workshops.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: In 1922, during the Russian Civil War, the territory of the future Jewish Autonomous Oblast became the scene of the Battle of Volochayevka.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: Although Judaism as a religion ran counter to the Bolshevik party's policy of atheism, Vladimir Lenin wanted to appease minority groups to gain their support and provide examples of tolerance.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: In 1924, the unemployment rate among Jews exceeded 30%, partially as a result of pogroms but also as a result of USSR policies against private property ownership, which prohibited them from being craftspeople and small businessmen as many had been prior to the revolution. With the goal of getting Jews back to work to be more productive members of society, the government established Komzet, the committee for the agricultural settlement of Jews. The Soviet government entertained the idea of resettling all Jews in the USSR in a designated territory where they would be able to pursue a lifestyle that was "socialist in content and national in form". The Soviets also wanted to offer an alternative to Zionism, the establishment of Mandate of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Socialist Zionists such as Ber Borochov were gaining followers at that time, and Zionism was the favored ideology in the world's political economy to the Yiddish interpretations which were essentially incompatible with the USSR because of the Yiddish movement's growing opposition (e.g. Emma Goldman) to the very ethno-nationalism which constituted and structured Soviet states.


title: Jewish Autonomous Oblast

text: The location that was initially considered in the early 1920s was Crimea, which already had a significant Jewish population. Two Jewish districts () were formed in Crimea and three in south Ukraine. However, an alternative scheme, perceived as more advantageous, was put into practice.