Famous Operas: A Quick and Easy Introduction

In the past several centuries, a form of music drama called opera has become popular.

Some of the most famous operas included:The Magic Flute (by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Fidelio (by Ludwig van Beethoven), The Barber of Seville (by Gioacchino Antonio Rossini), Tristan and Isolde (by Richard Wagner), Aida (by Giuseppe Verdi) and Madame Butterfly (by Giacomo Puccini).

These days you can see opera being performed by opera companies in most large cities. In addition, opera can easily be seen on the Internet. For example, YouTube has many videos of famousarias [songs] being performed.

In this hubpage, I will begin my introduction to opera by looking at Puccini's Madame Butterfly...

Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly, first appeared at La Scala opera theatre in 1904.

The opera tells a tale of love and abandonment. Pinkerton, an American naval officer, comes to Japan and falls in love with a Japanese lady, Madame Butterfly, who in turn trusts her heart to him.

They are married but Pinkerton sees his Japanese marriage as just a temporary one, valid only till the day when he will return to America for "a real marriage, a real wife from America."

Pinkerton goes away with the Navy for three years and then returns with his new American wife.

A tragedy now occurs -- for Butterfly believes that "Death with honour is better than life with dishonour!".

Some of the greatest operas have come from Italy, Germany/Austria, France, Russia and England.

Here are some of the greatest names that most people will have heard of:

Italy: Rossini (The Barber of Seville, William Tell), Verdi (La Traviata, Aida), Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor), Puccini (Madame Butterfly)

Germany: Mozart (The Magic Flute), Beethoven (Fidelio), Wagner (Tristan and Isolde, The Valkyries, The Flying Dutchman)

France: Bizet (Carmen), Berlioz (The Damnation of Faust), Goundo (Romeo and Juliet)

Russia: Tchaikovsky (Eugene Onegin), Stravinsky (The Rake's Progress), Shostakovich (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District)

England: Britten (Peter Grimes)

TIP: If you wanted to start with just three operas, I would suggest:

1. Rossini - The Barber of Seville
2. Mozart - The Magic Flute
3. Verdi - Aida
4. Wagner - Tristan and Isolde
5. Puccini - Madame Butterfly

Richard Wagner set the opera world on fire with his revolutionary view of opera and of music.

He promoted what he called Zukunftsmusik (Tomorrow's Music) in which instrumental performance, song, drama and art all formed one indisoluble whole and together created an uplifting experience never before experienced.

He also wove leitmotifs throughout his operas -- each one of which represented a theme.

Wagner's operas were huge affairs, not least in the length of time which they take to perform. For example, the Ring of the Nibelungen (a series of four operas including the the Valkyries) takes four evenings and anything from 15 to 20 hours to perform in all (depending of the speed of the conductor in charge).

For your interest, I attach a dramatic example of Wagner's instrumental and choral work in the following video, "The Ride of the Valkyries"(from Act 3 of his opera, The Valkyries).

Many great operas have unforgetable music with arias (songs) that once heard will never be forgotten.

And yes, the music is soaring and takes the listener to the heights of bliss and often the depths of unhappiness.

But it is an undeniable truth that many of the great operas are written in foreign languages -- particularly Italian, German, French and Russian.

The good news is that many opera DVDs these days come with the option to view the operas with English subtitles. An easy and profitable way to understand what the singers are saying.

Some of the greatest operas now have the original text (lyrics) and an English translation of each aria on the Internet. To get you going, here is a nice selection of the greatest arias in the original language and in translation.

But to really enjoy great operas in depth, it is necessary to study one or more of these languages. This is a task which is not as difficult as it may sound as there are specially designed "fast track" courses that teach the essentials of the chosen languages necessary for understanding opera (rather than a technical or everyday understanding that a learner would be expect to learn to be labelled a fluent speaker).

Some self-teaching courses published by Assimil or by Linguaphone will have you up and running with an everyday knowledge of your chosen language in less than six months.

Some people combine a trip to Europe with a course studying the language of the their favorite operas. For example, the Scuola Leonardo da Vinci (School Leonardo da Vinci) has classes in Rome, Florence, Siena and Milan teacing the "language of the opera".