Opera | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: Subhajit Sahu
Date: 2018-12-05

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Opera


00:03:36 1 Operatic terminology
00:05:45 2 History
00:05:53 2.1 Origins
00:07:43 2.2 Italian opera
00:07:52 2.2.1 Baroque era
00:11:01 2.2.2 Reform: Gluck, the attack on the Metastasian ideal, and Mozart
00:12:59 2.2.3 Bel canto, Verdi and verismo
00:16:20 2.3 German-language opera
00:20:53 2.4 French opera
00:25:21 2.5 English-language opera
00:32:16 2.6 Russian opera
00:34:27 2.7 Other national operas
00:38:39 2.8 Contemporary, recent, and modernist trends
00:38:49 2.8.1 Modernism
00:42:36 2.8.2 Other trends
00:45:06 2.8.3 From musicals back towards opera
00:46:21 2.9 Acoustic enhancement in opera
00:47:11 3 Operatic voices
00:47:34 3.1 Vocal classifications
00:49:24 3.2 Historical use of voice parts
00:52:09 3.3 Famous singers
00:54:02 4 Changing role of the orchestra
00:59:24 5 Language and translation issues
01:01:55 6 Funding
01:03:46 7 Television, cinema and the Internet



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SUMMARY
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Opera (Italian: [ˈɔːpera]; English plural: operas; Italian plural: opere [ˈɔːpere]) is a form of theatre in which music has a leading role and the parts are taken by singers.  Such a "work" (the literal translation of "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor.
Opera is a key part of the Western classical music tradition. Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as musical theater, Singspiel and Opéra comique. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of singing: recitative, a speech-inflected style and self-contained arias. The 19th century saw the rise of the continuous music drama.
Opera originated in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri's mostly lost Dafne, produced in Florence in 1598) and soon spread through the rest of Europe: Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England all helped to establish their national traditions in the 17th century. In the 18th century, Italian opera continued to dominate most of Europe (except France), attracting foreign composers such as George Frideric Handel. Opera seria was the most prestigious form of Italian opera, until Christoph Willibald Gluck reacted against its artificiality with his "reform" operas in the 1760s. The most renowned figure of late 18th-century opera is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who began with opera seria but is most famous for his Italian comic operas, especially The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, as well as Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), and The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), landmarks in the German tradition.
The first third of the 19th century saw the high point of the bel canto style, with Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini all creating works that are still performed. It also saw the advent of Grand Opera typified by the works of Auber and Meyerbeer. The mid-to-late 19th century was a golden age of opera, led and dominated by Giuseppe Verdi in Italy and Richard Wagner in Germany. The popularity of opera continued through the verismo era in Italy and contemporary French opera through to Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss in the early 20th century. During the 19th century, parallel operatic traditions emerged in central and eastern Europe, particularly in Russia and Bohemia. The 20th century saw many experiments with modern styles, such as atonality and serialism (Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg), Neoclassicism (Igor Stravinsky), and Minimalism (Philip Glass and John Adams). With the rise of recording tec ...