The orchestra grew from the time of Mozart through Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini and Richard Strauss so that nowadays an opera orchestra can easily consist of 90 to 100 players. Incidentally, in America the first floor of a theatre is called the orchestra, whereas in England that area is called the stalls. The extra notes, like appogiaturas, scales, trills or cadenzas that can enhance a melodic line when it has to be repeated. Ornamentation and embellishment are essentially interchangeable terms. The location of a sound on a scale ranging from high to low.
Counterpoint is certainly an element which creates polyphony.
It did not until recently come to describe the personality of the singer, rather than the importance of her role in the opera. In many international houses, where singers perform without benefit of long musical rehearsal periods, a prompter can be invaluable as a memory aide for a jet-lagged singer. Even so, proscenium is used in a larger, more general sense, in the meaning of a stage constructed with a curtain, as opposed to a thrust stage where the stage has no formal enclosure. Many opera houses in Europe today have stages that are permanently sloped like this. Those forms generally express states of mind while the recitative describes a course of action.