The 19th century German composer Richard \TWagner\t was speaking for composers of opera in all ages when he wrote of his aspiration to combine acting, singing, instrumental music, storytelling, poetry, painting, and architecture in a "complete art work" (Gesamtkunstwerk). With the addition of dancing, these are the elements that, in varying proportions, have gone into the drama with singing actors that has been known as "opera" since shortly after its inception about 1600. This elaborate art form has attracted many of the finest minds in literature, drama, music, and visual art, and it has given those arts much in return, including such musical forms as The \Tsymphony\t and \Tsuite\t, the proscenium stage, and elaborate scenery of the European theater. ORIGIN: AN ARISTOCRATIC EXPERIMENT Opera stems from the courts of aristocratic rulers, who vied with each other in the magnificence of their private and public spectacles. By the early 17th century the courtly Italian variety show of songs, dances, and poetic tributes called a mascherata was being imitated by the French kings with their court ballets and masquerades, and by England's Stuart monarchy with its "masques". Like many other art forms of the Renaissance, opera was created by reformers who wanted to replace scholasticism and complication in the arts with the simplicity and humanism of the ancient Greeks. In drama during the 16th century the plots of the new pastoral plays were usually derived from classical mythology and celebrated a bygone Golden Age. A group of Florentine thinkers (the "Camerata"), in the last third of the century, attempted to imagine what the music of the ancient Greek drama sounded like, and came up with a declamatory solo vocal line with simple instrumental accompaniment. This "stile rappresentativo" (theatrical style) was designed to project and enhance the words--in contrast with the contrapuntal madrigal, whose words were buried in a welter of competing voice parts. In 1594 the poet Ottavio Rinuccini (1562-1621) expanded a small mascherate into a pastoral play, and the composers Peri and Jacopo Corsi (1561-1602) set his text to music in the new style. The resulting work, of which only two short fragments survive, was Dafne (1598), generally considered to be the first opera. Another Rinuccini-Peri collaboration, Euridice, based on the myth of Orpheus and Euridice and performed in 1600, is the first opera whose music has been preserved intact. Most of its vocal music is rhapsodic, speechlike monody, but some scenes end with songs in regular meter, which more closely approach the operatic \Taria\t. The earliest operas included roles for castrati, male singers who had been castrated in boyhood so that their voices would remain in the soprano or contralto range. This practice produced adult voices of trumpet like clarity and carrying power that despite their high pitch, became associated with heroic male roles. As the music of opera developed, so did the bravura singing of the castrati, until by the middle of the 18th century they were the reigning celebrities of the music world. With Orfeo (1607), by Claudio \TMonteverdi\t, opera made the leap from an experiment in musical declamation to an integrated, vital art form. In Orfeo he combined monodic melody, madrigals, songs in a popular style, a large and varied orchestra, dramatic timing, scenic effects, and reprises of a leitmotif-like theme (ritornello) to create a musical drama that remains compelling today. Until the middle of the 17th century, court opera was centered in Rome, where the powerful Barbarini family of popes and cardinals sponsored operas by Stafano Landi (c.1586-c.1639), Domenico Mazzocchi (1592-1665), Loreto Vittori (c.1600-1670), Luigi Rossi (c.1597-1653), and others. The orchestral preludes to the acts in Landi's Sant' Alessio (1632) suggest, in rudimentary form, genres that would later be central to baroque instrumental music: the church \Tsonata\t, French \Toverture\t, and Italian overture, or sinfonia. OPERA GOES PUBLIC Opera became a popular art form virtually overnight in 1637, the year the first public opera house opened in Venice. By the end of the century the citizens of Venice were supporting six opera companies and had seen nearly 400 operas. Monteverdi gave this phase a distinguished beginning with his last two operas, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses to His Country, 1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642). Two important popularizers were Pier Francesco \TCavalli\t and Pietro Antonio \TCesti\t, whose works catered to the public's love of solo singing with fewer choruses than earlier operas, and with arias in da capo form. Italian opera also spurred efforts in other countries to create a native music theater. From 1678 to 1738 a public opera house in Hamburg presented, in German, an assortment of operas that drew on Italian, French, and German theatrical traditions, culminating in the sophisticated works of Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739). With the addition of arias and recitative, the traditional English court masque began to resemble a pastoral opera in Venus and Adonis (c.1682) by John \TBlow\t. The one true opera by Henry \TPurcell\t, Dido and Aeneas (1689), provides a glimpse in miniature of a true English-language operatic style. In Paris a Florentine violinist and dancer named Giovanni Battista Lulli won an effective royal monopoly on opera inn Paris. As Jean Baptist \TLully\t, he collaborated with Philippe Quinault (1635-1688) on a series of operas, including Cadmus et Hermione (1673), Alceste (1674), Atys (1676), Proserpine (1680), and Armide (1686). Lully's operas are tailored to the French taste for dramatic verse and dancing; a fluid style of accompanied recitative and lengthy ballets are conspicuous features. Two generations later, Jean Philippe \TRameau\t enriched the Lullian formula with more contrapuntal writing for orchestra and chorus, adventurous harmonies, and a greatly expanded repertoire of dances. THE 18TH CENTURY: BUFFA VERSUS SERIA By 1700, Naples was leading the way in Italian opera. The public's taste for comic scenes led Alessandro Scarlatti (see \TScarlatti\t family) and others in that city to compose entire \Lcomic opera\ls, with plots derived from whatever was in theatrical fashion: love stories, escape dramas, satire, farce. By the middle of the 19th century, Neapolitan opera buffa was being imitated all over Europe; the Neapolitan composers Giovanni \TPaisiello\t and Domenico \TCimarosa\t would carry the tradition into the 19th century. Court opera, meanwhile, reached once again for its antique roots through the dramatic poetry of Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) and Pietro Trapassi, called \TMetastasio\t. Their elegant and scholarly verse, which placed noble heroes of ancient times in highly conventionalized situations usually involving a conflict of love and duty, was turned into opera seria, first by the court composers Antonio \TCaldara\t and Johann Joseph \TFux\t, and later by dozens of composers all over Europe. The music of Metastasian opera seria was as ritualized as its plots: characters invariably exited the stage at the end of their arias, and the arias were neatly classified according to the mood they illustrated (rage aria, lament, avowal of love, and so on). The greatest weakness of opera seria was also its greatest glory: the long da capo arias repeatedly brought the drama to a halt, and yet the opportunities they provided for singers attracted a wide public to this most aristocratic of genres. George Frideric \THandel\t made a successful venture of opera seria in London theaters, mounting new works virtually every year. Like his contemporary Rameau, Handel revitalized an operatic genre without breaking its conventions; his shapely melodies and sure theatrical instincts captivated English audiences. The inevitable reaction took several forms. In England the dramatist John \TGay\t and the composer John Christopher Pepusch (1667-1752) collaborated on The Beggar's Opera, whose sensational success in 1728 spawned dozens more "ballad operas". Using spoken dialogue and new lyrics fitted to familiar popular tunes, ballad opera featured a cast of lowlife types and mocked lofty targets, particularly Handelian opera. The French opera comique developed along similar lines, from older roots in 17th century Italian comedy troupes. A fresh Italian influence arrived in Paris in 1752-54 with the performance of several comic operas, most notably La serva padrona, an \Tintermezzo\t by the Neapolitan composer Giovanni Battista \TPergolesi\t. Defenders of the "high art" of Lullian tragedie lyrique and those of the "naturalness" of the Italian buffa style clashed in the "Querelle des Bouffons" ("War of the Buffoons"). During the second half of the 18th century, a distinctively French style of popular opera evolved, with sentimental plots, spoken dialogue, and casts of virtuous peasants, oppressive nobles, or other familiar stage types. Andre \TGretry\t's Richard Coeur-de-Lion (1784) demonstrated how serious and affecting such an opera comique could be, pointing the way to such important works of the next century as Faust (1859) by Charles \TGounod\t and Carmen (1875) by Georges \TBizet\t. The ideal of "naturalness" that underlay the operas comiques encouraged Christoph Willibald \TGluck\t to follow similar principles in serious opera. He wrote that his aim was "to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry", a phrase reminiscent of the Florentine monodists. Gluck composed his first "reform" opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, in 1762. His avoidance of opera's most artificial features--notably, embellished coloratura arias and secco (accompanied only by harpsichord) recitative--represented a new style of classical simplicity and unity. The great composers of the Viennese classical period wrote operas that at least contain interesting music. The operas of Franz Josef \THaydn\t and Franz \TSchubert\t suffer from poor librettos and a lack of any real theatrical instinct on the composers' part. \TBeethoven\t's only opera, Fidelio (1804-14), carries on the opera comique tradition of "rescue" operas by Getry and Luigi \TCherubini\t, setting a flawed libretto to music of symphonic complexity and eloquence. Of this group, only Wolfgang Amadeus \TMozart\t was a dramatist through and through. Mozart was at home in opera seria (Idomeneo, 1871; La Clemenza di Tito, 1791); the German musical play or \TSingspiel\t (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782; The Magic Flute, 1791); and comic opera (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786; Don Giovanni, 1787; Cosi fan tutte, 1790), these last three in collaboration with the master librettist Lorenzo \TDa Ponte\t. Mozart projected his insights into human nature with unprecedented color and depth. His love of counterpoint led to revealing dialogues between singer and orchestra, his symphonic experience greatly enriched his operatic scoring, and his mastery of concerto writing translated into unsurpassed vocal ensembles. THE POPULAR IMPULSE As the 19th century began, both serious and comic opera were becoming mass art. Anything that made operas more understandable and approachable was welcome, and no one achieved this goal more completely than Gioacchino \TRossini\t, who devised a formalized plan for the musical numbers in a scene, then clothed that plan in memorable tunes and ebullient orchestral writing. The cult of the singer was alive and well during this period. The final flowering of \Tbel canto\t ("beautiful singing") came in the operas of Gaetano \TDonizetti\t and Vincenzo \TBellini\t, which combined dramatic arias with increasing subtlety of harmony and orchestral color. Political subjects could stir opera audiences to open revolt, as happened in 1830 when the Brussels premiere of La muette de Portici by Daniel Francois Esprit \TAuber\t ignited the Belgian independence movement against the Dutch. Giuseppi \TVerdi\t became suddenly famous after near-riots took place at Milan performances of his third opera, Nabucco (1842), one of whose choruses ("Va, pensiero") became an anthem of Italians resisting Austrian domination. Verdi dominated Italian opera for the rest of the 19th century. Whether his subject was politics (Ernani, 1844; Macbeth, 1847; Don Carlos, 1867), revenge (Rigoletto, 1851; Otello, 1887), tragic love (La Traviata, 1853; Aida, 1871), or the comic human predicament (Falstaff, 1893), he forged a realistic dramatic idiom that translates human passions directly into orchestral music and singing. No theorist or musical revolutionary, Verdi was a practical man of the theater who demanded superb librettos from Arrigo \TBoito\t and others, and set them to maximum dramatic effect. No composer of operas during much of the 19th century escaped the influence of the Opera in Paris, where a spectacle-loving middle class demanded ever-more-lavish productions in four or five acts, with epic-heroic stories, dazzling scenic effects, a large and active chorus, and a ballet. The term "grand opera", sometimes used to mean any opera without spoken dialogue, refers more specifically to this genre, pioneered by Gaspare \TSpontini\t and brought to its pack by Giacomo \TMeyerbeer\t. Les Troyens by Hector \TBerlioz\t is a grand opera in form, but it is preoccupied with a symphonic exposition of its epic themes rather than portrayal of individual characters. The purity of its French declamation is more in the spirit of Gluck than of Meyerbeer. NEW NATIONAL IDENTITIES: GERMANY AND ELSEWHERE In Germany, romantic philosophy sowed seeds in the opera house that grew slowly throughout the 19th century. Romanticism dictated new subjects and musical idioms, and a free, open-ended method of musical development that was the opposite of static, formulaic opera seria. The landmark work here is Der Freischutz ("The Freeshooter", 1821), a Singspiel by Carl Maria von \TWeber\t that seamlessly combines operatic arias and choruses with romantic elements such as folksong, coloristic scoring, scenes of country life, and supernatural horror. Delving into literature, Teutonic mythology, philosophy, and the most advanced trends in non-operatic music, Richard \TWagner\t vastly expanded opera's expressive canvas. In Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger von Nurnburg (1868), the four operas of the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1853-74), and Parsifal (1882), set-piece arias give way to "endless melody," chromatic harmonies avoid resolution for minutes at a time, and the technique of leitmotif grows into a multi-layered system of musical references to character, events, and concepts in the plot. Wagner also enlarged the orchestra, inventing new types of instruments for it, and required a new kind of singer to convey the philosophical, dramatic, and musical power and subtleties of his scores. Richard \TStrauss\t drew on Wagner's orchestral and harmonic resources, and on leitmotif, creating opulent, attractive music on the romantic themes of decadence (Salome, 1905), Greek tragedy (Elektra, 1909), nostalgia (Der Rosenkavalier, 1911), and a fairy tale (Die Frau ohne Schatten, The Woman without a Shadow, 1919). Political nationalism in the late 19th century was reflected in the opera house, especially in eastern Europe. Russian and Central Asian folk music, Russian history, and Russian fairy tales imparted their unique color to the operas of Mikhail \TGlinka\t, Modest \TMussorgsky\t, Nikolai \TRimsky-Korsakov\t, and Alexander \TBorodin\t. In Bohemia, Bedrich \TSmetana\t and Antonin \TDvorak\t composed operas of village life with a strong Czech folk flavor; Leos \TJanacek\t cultivated a spare, contemporary idiom based on Czech speech in Jenufa (1894-1903). THE 20TH CENTURY: OPERA AS CLASSICAL MUSIC Italy's \Tverismo\t ("realism") school, which arose to fill the vacuum left by Verdi's retirement in the 1890's, continued to supply operas with wide popular appeal, beginning with Pagliacci (1892) by Ruggero \TLeoncavallo\t and including works by Pietro \TMascagni\t and Umberto \TGiordano\t. The melting, sentimental idiom of Giacomo \TPuccini\t is not pure verismo, but he drew freely on this style, as well as on German and Russian models, in his varied and dramatically effective output. Verismo featured characters from everyday life, often in violent or tragic situations, which made it a fitting opening to the 20th century, during which operas have often occupied themselves with the moral and spiritual concerns of a violent age. Claude \TDebussy\t's only opera, Pellas et Mlisande (1902), remains a unique masterpiece of emotionally distanced symbolist poetry set to evocative music. Igor \TStravinsky\t wrote extensively for the stage, usually in hybrid forms combining ballet, musical theater, and cantata; his true operas, (The Nightingale, 1909-14; Mavra, 1922; The Rake's Progress, 1951) outline his own progress from Russian late romantic to neoclassicist. Paul \THindemith\t traced a similar journey, from the expressionism and satire of his early operas to the philosophical ripeness of Mathis der Maler (1938) and Die Harmonie der Welt (1951). Composers of the second Viennese school deployed 12-tone harmony to expressive advantage in the opera house, Arnold \TSchoenberg\t in works of psychological or religious depth, Alban \TBerg\t in a dramatically effective combination of social protest and tender lyricism (Wozzeck, 1925; Lulu, 1929-35). Their versatile and prolific successor in the postwar period, Hans Werner \THenze\t, has composed grand operas, chamber operas, and comic operas in a serial idiom. The elegance and clarity of French opera, and its subordination of pure musical display to the dramatic text, continued in the works of Francis \TPoulenc\t and Darius \TMilhaud\t. The lean yet expressive idiom of Benjamin \TBritten\t, colored with English folk melody and tailored to the English language, came to full flower in Peter Grimes (1945). Since then, English opera has enjoyed a long-delayed "golden age" in works by Britten, Michael \TTippett\t, Peter Maxwell \TDavies\t, and many other composers. The United States also took a long time to find its operatic voice. In recent times, conservative composers such as Samuel \Tbarber\t and Giancarlo \TMenotti\t have written melodious, effective works in English, following French and Italian models. In the 1930's, composers such as Aaron \TCopland\t and Virgil \TThomson\t exploited the wealth of contemporary American musical material in folk song, jazz, and choral music. A celebrated composer of musical comedy, George \TGershwin\t, built a bridge between Broadway and the opera house with a grand opera based on Southern black life and music, Porgy and Bess (1935). Later composers such as Leonard \TBernstein\t and Steven \TSondheim\t have crossed back and forth on that bridge, developing the nervous rhythms and distinctive phrasing of American popular song into a more extended, "operatic" language. Like Porgy, their works have been performed both by casts of Broadway singing actors and by opera companies. Since World War II the proliferation of university opera workshops and regional opera companies has encouraged many noted American composers to write operas. Specialists in the genre include Robert Ward, Stephen Paulus, Thomas Pasatieri, and Dominick \TArgento\t. The "minimalist" operas of Philip \Tglass\t (Einstein on the Beach, 1976; Satyagraha, 1981; Akhnaten, 1984) have attracted wide attention for their hypnotic use of non-Western musical and literary element. Their static onstage tableaux and emphasis on musical color rather than movement link them more to visual arts than to theater. David Wright Bibliography: Donington, Robert, The Opera (1978) and The Rise of Opera (1981); Grout, Donald Jay, and Williams, Hermine W., A Short History of Opera, 3d ed. (1988); Hamm, Charles, Opera (1980); Jacobs, Arthur, and Sadie, Stanley, Opera: A Modern Guide (1972); Kobbe, Gustav, Kobe's Complete Opera ook, rev. by the Earl of Harewood (1976); Lang, Paul Henry, Music in Western Civilization (1941) and Critic at the Opera (1971); Orrey, Leslie, Opera: A Concise History, 2d ed., rev. by Rodney Milnes (1987); Rosenthal, Harold, and Warrack, John, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, 2d ed. (1979). See also: \TAmerican music\t; \Tbaroque music\t; \Tclassical period in music\t; \Tcomic opera\t; \TEnglish music\t; \TFrench music\t; \TGerman and Austrian music\t; \TItalian music\t; \Toperetta\t; \Tromanticism\t (music); \TRussian music\t.