Covering some of the most popular and beloved classics as well as legenday composers, major historic milestones, enduring musical traditions, and ongoing cultural controversies, we present an unflinching and (not so) brief opera guide for the curious.

Allow us to introduce opera. She’s a gal of wealth and taste.

Actually, that’s a lie.

Opera is for everyone regardless of bank balance or personal preference. 

And we’re going to prove it to you.

You might be surprised by how much opera you already know.

So, let’s start again.

Hi. Welcome. Pull up a chair and have your earphones at the ready. 

The following pages are our stab at a digital introduction to opera for all ages. (And we say “stab” because, sadly, knives can and will show up repeatedly. As you’ll see, opera can get very messy in many different ways.)

Never heard an opera before? Cool. This is where you belong. Not exactly sure what an opera is? Excellent. We’ve got you. Consider yourself an opera expert? We’re glad you’re here!

In fact, before we go any further, let’s explain what we mean by opera:

We’ll get into the literal meaning of the word in a minute; but, for the purposes of this journey, “opera” is a musical and theatrical art form in which a story unfolds through song with performers singing their lines instead of speaking them. There are many ways these lines can be uttered—they can take shape as a legit musical ballad; they can be sung in spurts similar to normal conversation; or they can pour out in a stream of conscious musical thought—but the basic principle is the singing drives the story. 

Though that’s not all there is to it. 

Opera is a group effort that harnesses the creative gifts of composers, poets, singing actors, instrumentalists, dancers, designers, stagehands, and others.

Since music is opera’s chief method of communication (more on this later), we will focus mostly on composers, particularly when we talk about an opera’s underlying meaning or its primary emotional colors. These elements are so inextricably linked to the music (or “score”) that it’s hard not to think of the composer as the ultimate creator or owner.

We’ll be short-handing the composer’s relationship to an opera by referring to it as “theirs”—as in, Verdi’s Don Carlo, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, or Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier—but please bear in mind most operas need an army of artists to make them sing.

Our goal here is not to make you into a rabid opera groupie. Instead, we want to expose you to a little bit of opera’s history and acquaint you with some of its standard features and artistic figures in order to help you understand why its popularity has endured for four centuries (and counting!) and why some operas have captured audiences’ imaginations more than others. 

We also want to help new listeners realize that opera is not just one thing. After more than four hundred years, it has no standard sound, no strict story template, and no rules except those designed to be broken. 

Sure, there are genre-defining conventions and themes, but don’t get too comfortable. Opera has its fair share of genre-defying examples, too. “Black and white”? That isn’t really opera’s vibe. And we hope that, in reading this, you’ll start making friends with the gray. There are certainly some essential operatic criteria and we’ll teach you how to spot them. But we never want you to feel opera needs to check a prescribed set of academic boxes to count as the real deal.  

That said, we’d love for you to come away with a sense of how to evaluate opera. (Notice we said “evaluate” and not “judge.”) We want to help you answer questions like: “What should I be listening for?”, “How can I recognize this composer’s unique sound?”, “How is opera singing even supposed to work?”. This is because we know opera as a concept can feel like a huge unknown at times, especially if you come in with zero ideas as to what it’s meant to do or what the artists are trying to achieve. However we’re here to remind you: There’s no “right way in” to liking opera. Any way that you find your operatic bliss is fine by us.

Our biggest objective is for you to leave this introduction with a basic framework for how to enjoy and experience opera to the fullest without any added brain strain or stress. And, if you don’t start enjoying yourself immediately, that’s emphatically okay. Just do us a favor and keep going if you can. We think somehow, some way, you’ll eventually find it’s all been worth it. 

Opera is good like that.

Let’s be upfront about something: Western classical music existed for literal centuries before opera made its grand entrance. And this project should in no way be mistaken for a full Western Music History course (which would have to take things at least all the way back to Ancient Greece). There’s a whole, multi-layered story of Western music to discover—from early dramas to Byzantine chant to a steadily blossoming portfolio of masses, ensembles, and songs built on the chanting tradition—and none of it will be dealt with here. 

This space, for better or worse, will just look at opera. Though it didn’t become a documented thing until around the 17th century, opera had many Western ancestors, including: 

• Medieval music plays featuring troubadour story-songs 
• The intermedio (or later, intermezzo), a Renaissance- and early-Enlightenment-era musical interlude sung between acts during a spoken drama 
• Madrigal cycles, in which small vocal ensembles sang a collection of songs that strung together a single story or theme 

But, let’s be upfront about something else: The opera we’ll be talking about here is primarily a Western European art. Its forms and traditions were celebrated and popularized in a relatively small part of the world where white males held almost all the power. But that’s not to say opera—or, to put it another way, musical storytelling—was exclusive to the Northern or Western Hemispheres.

In fact, cultures across the globe have championed musical stories since well before opera began. And opera is forever in their debt.

A life-size figure from the kabuki theater replica at the Edo-Tokyo Museum. Photo by Greg Gladman.

International genres that may have helped influence or inform Western opera include:

• Naqqāli: Naqqāls are well respected solo storytellers and guardians of their cultural and regional heritage. Their narrative tradition began during the Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE, part of present-day Iran), and their stories are sometimes conveyed through song, poetry, gesture, and musical accompaniment—all crucial ingredients in opera. Naqqāls are also required to be good improvisors—a trait shared by opera singers, especially in the bel canto opera style, which we’ll get to on our Early Romantic Era page.
• Chinese Opera: One of three ancestral forms of collaborative musical storytelling (along with Sanskrit drama and Ancient Greek theatre), Chinese opera relies on vocal and instrumental music to help present characters’ feelings and motivations. Its long and storied history stretches from the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) all the way through to today, with highlights that include performances in mid-19th and early-20th century America).
• Sanskrit Classical Drama: Sanskrit drama is an ancient Indian art with roots dating back to well before the 4th century CE. Much like Western opera, Sanskrit drama is underscored by the belief that a combination of music, art, dance, and poetic verse can carry audiences to new planes of emotion and personal reflection. A Sanskrit drama performance can sometimes have song-like recitations and may have served as an ancestor to the Western opera tradition of recitative. (See our Baroque Era page for more.) 
• Griots: Born in the 13th century in what’s now the nation of Mali, Griots (also known as Jalis) were—and still are—the premiere custodians of West African history. Their communities depend on them to remember and recite the defining cultural stories of the African Sahel region, and they do much of it in song. Interestingly, their musical oral tradition runs somewhat parallel to early Western medieval troubadours whose narrative songs were a precursor to later staged works such as operas.
• Noh: Noh is a music-infused storytelling art that originated in 14th century feudal Japan. Noh actors often use a heighted form of speech similar to singing (a style very close to German Sprechstimme, which developed much later). Conceits of Noh include main characters who are literal ghosts (as seen in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer) as well as characters who first appear in disguise (as seen in Wagner’s Die Walküre, Puccini’s Turandot, and many, many more).
• Kabuki: Roughly as old as Western opera, kabuki’s first syllable, “ka” (歌), translates as “song” or “sing,” which reflects just how important music is to this narrative genre. As in Noh, kabuki actors sometimes intone their speech, almost as if they were singing. Kabuki also includes offstage and onstage accompaniment from a small ensemble of musicians who will occasionally sing as part of the drama.

…and many of the above are still practiced to this very day. 

Consider this an official reminder that musical storytelling doesn’t exist in a European vacuum; and, however much we might love and wax poetic about opera, there’s a vast landscape of musical-narrative-driven artwork to explore and enjoy beyond this space.

We’ll say it again: Opera is messy. Onstage and off. And to give you a real, honest glimpse into its history, we’ll have to offer up the good and the bad. So please know that in the pages that follow, we’ve tried to call out opera’s many flaws in addition to its many achievements.

A few things to review before we dive in:

• Opera is guilty of sins of omission and oppression, just like much of Western art as a whole. People and cultures have been marginalized. Voices (literal and figurative) have been suppressed. We’ll do our best to bring attention to these issues as we attempt to tell opera’s larger story. 
• Operatic plots are not always pleasant or comfortable. Many deal with highly-charged themes that examine physical and emotional trauma in varied forms. Today’s opera companies are frequently obliged to tackle disturbing content head-on, meaning modern operagoing audiences can be faced with difficult subject matter that speaks to crimes and atrocities previous generations might (frustratingly) have found more “tolerable.” 
• Opera is the product of human beings. These human beings were and are often complex, problematic, or straight-up indefensible in their behavior. We hope to keep this in perspective for you as we go.
• Operatic performance practices have likewise proven problematic. As our social sensitivities have evolved, opera has to some extent tried to do the same. It appears that modern operas and modern opera companies are shifting toward a more positive, accepting, and inclusive environment, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.  
• Opera needs to update and expand its depiction of disability, and more steps must be taken to open doors for artists, administrators, and audience members with disabilities. Recently, some theaters have embraced added technology that allows for a more inclusive opera-going experience (assisted listening systems and captions for patrons with auditory disabilities, surtitles for language translation, and live audio descriptions for those with visual impairments), but there remains ample opportunity for opera to welcome both stories about disability and performers and professionals with disabilities.

A small robot, the size an eight-year-old child, is the star of a 2015 opera at Berlin’s Komische Oper. The robot, developed by the Humboldt University of Berlin and known as Myon, appears in a performance of “My Square Lady,” during which he learns what it means to feel human emotions, express them, and promote them in others. [The Guardian]

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Gifts and grants to educational programs at the Kennedy Center are provided by The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation; Bank of America; Capital One; The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; The Ednah Root Foundation; Genesis Inspiration Foundation; Harman Family Foundation; William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust; the Kimsey Endowment; The Kiplinger Foundation; Laird Norton Family Foundation; Lois and Richard England Family Foundation; Dr. Gary Mather and Ms. Christina Co Mather; The Markow Totevy Foundation; Dr. Gerald and Paula McNichols Foundation; The Morningstar Foundation; Myra and Leura Younker Endowment Fund; The Irene Pollin Audience Development and Community Engagement Initiatives;

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