Opera: where to start?

One question often posed online is “Where should I start with opera?”. Opera is too often treated as something daunting, and people are told they must start with easy listening / warhorse / “beginner” works. Neither is true.

If you have seen a play, or watched a movie, or heard a musical, you can handle opera. You don’t need “beginner” operas any more than you need “beginner” films or plays.

Opera is NOT difficult. In fact, it’s easy to enjoy. Opera is drama through music (usually in the theatre, but there are also operas written for radio and even television). Yes, it’s often great drama and great music, but like Shakespeare or Euripides, Hitchcock or Spielberg, it’s simultaneously art and popular entertainment. It’s the precursor to blockbuster cinema (with drama, spectacle, special effects, and music enhancing the action). And it has good tunes.

Or as Nanny Ogg said: “There’s your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like “Oh oh oh, I am dyin’, oh I am dyin’, oh oh oh, that’s what I’m doin'”, and there’s your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes “Beer! Beer! Beer!'”

Opera – like all drama – speaks to the heart, but it also speaks to the brain and to the bowels, as well as to the soul. It’s theatre, history, fantasy, emotion, philosophy woven together. It’s exciting, uplifting, moving, thought-provoking, tragic and funny. We’re not talking about Noh or Kathakali here. (The only operas that really require much preparation are Wagner and some of the 20th century stuff – Schoenberg and Stockhausen and Co. – but they’re exceptions.)

Some opera enthusiasts believe that the best (indeed the only) way to enjoy opera is in the opera house. Which is wrong. Watching opera on YouTube or DVD or film is a great way to discover opera. (Particularly since a lot of modern productions let the director run amok.) There are a lot of excellent recordings of classics on YouTube, such as Ponnelle’s Marriage of Figaro, Barber of Seville, Rigoletto; Madama Butterfly; and Salome and Elektra.

For my part, I listened to Rheingold when I was seven, watched Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (Glyndebourne, 1993) on television when I was 10, devoured my parents’ opera collection (Straszny dwór, Dutchman, Orfeo) in elementary school, and saw my first live opera (Faust) when I was 15.

Now, the warhorses that are trotted out are tuneful, yes; entertaining, yes; but they offer a rather limited perspective: comedy of manners or emotional melodrama, composed in three countries within the span of a little over a century.

Recommendations

Below is a proposed list of starter operas. It aims to offer a broader perspective, from Baroque to 20th century naturalistic drama. It is designed to show what opera is, and what it can do, beyond “boy meets girl, they snog, she snuffs it, probably from consumption, lots of weeping”.

Vinci: Artaserse (1730). Baroque opera, libretto by Metastasio. Setting: Persia. The 18^th century was the great age of the castrato; since emasculating boys is now frowned upon, these days opera seria is sung by countertenors. This has an all-male cast, as it premiered in Rome, where the Pope banned actresses. Artaserse features some of the best countertenors (and one tenor): Philippe Jaroussky, Franco Fagioli, Max Emanuel Cencic. This may seem a left-field choice, but it is a better introduction to Baroque opera than the stodgier Handel. The music is thrilling, the singing extraordinary, and it’s dramatic: murder, ambition, love. People fall madly in love with it: I listened to it half-a-dozen times in one weekend; at least two people listened to it non-stop for weeks; one considers it his favourite opera after Figaro, while another was inspired to create a graphic novel. It has one of the all-time great arias, “Vo solcando un mar crudele”; Fagioli’s performance has been watched 2.4 million times.

Gluck: Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). Reform opera, based on Euripides. Gluck reformed opera from what he considered the excesses of opera seria; he emphasised dramatic truth and noble simplicity rather than bravura singing. Iphigénie en Tauride is his masterpiece, and arguably the best opera of the late 18th century; Hector Berlioz, for one, considered it a masterpiece of the human spirit.

Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots (1836) or Le Prophète (1849). French grand opéra. Meyerbeer was the most acclaimed opera composer of the mid-19^th century, hailed as the Michelangelo, the Shakespeare, the Æschylus, the Goethe of music. A Jew, born in Germany, he moved to Italy to study the voice, and then went to Paris, where he wrote four grands opéras: five-act works with plenty of spectacle, combining Italian bel canto singing, German orchestration and French melody, on serious historical themes (the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Anabaptist revolt, Vasco da Gama), addressing themes of intolerance, persecution, demagoguery, political manipulation, and colonialism. Traditional forms (arias, duets, ensembles) are raised to heights that wowed Meyerbeer’s contemporaries (including Berlioz, Bizet, Tchaikovsky and even Wagner), and influenced later composers.

Gounod: Faust (1859). French opera, based on Goethe. Once one of the most popular operas in the world. This was the first opera I saw live: here were heaven and hell onstage, with swordfights, a (doomed) love story, and great tunes. (I knew of the Jewel Song from Tintin, sung by the Milanese nightingale, Bianca Castafiore: “Ah, my beauty past compare!”) It was sinister and sardonic and sensuous at once. It captured my imagination in a way that “boy meets girl, they fall in love, she dies of consumption, everyone weeps” would not have.

Offenbach: Les Brigands (1869). French comic opera (opéra-bouffe). Offenbach (another German Jew who moved to Paris) is one of my favourite composers: his operas are witty, tuneful satires on politics, war, operatic and social conventions. In one, Jupiter, disguised as a fly, tries to seduce a mortal, while Public Opinion pursues a merry widower. The soprano sings a delirious waltz while cannibals cook her alive. Impostors sing ensembles in Chinese or Italian gibberish, while the chorus get roaring drunk. And there’s pathos, too. Les Brigands is a great introduction; there is an excellent production (on Medici TV) which feels very Astérix in tone.

Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov (1874). Russian opera, based on Pushkin. The dark glory of Russian opera: a historical epic about a guilt-wracked usurping tsar, the renegade who claims to be the child he murdered, and popular revolt. Has monologues of great intensity and spectacular crowd scenes: the Forest of Kromy scene is what opera is for.

Verdi: Otello (1887). Italian opera, based on Shakespeare. Verdi dominated Italian opera for half a century, from the 1840s to the 1890s; he took the bel canto idiom of his predecessors (Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Mercadante) and turned it to dramatic ends, seeking always to make compelling theatre. Otello was his second-last opera, premiered 16 years after his last work (Aida). It is considered his masterpiece: almost through-composed, like Wagner’s operas; greater harmonic and orchestral richness; more subtlety in the characterisation.

Janáček: Jenůfa (1904). Czech opera. Janáček is considered one of the two or three great opera composers of the twentieth century; Jenůfa was his breakthrough work. It is a naturalistic work, set in a Czech village, dealing with teen pregnancy, jealousy, assault, and infanticide.

Strauss: Salome (1905) or Elektra (1909). German opera. Strauss was the most important German opera composer after Richard Wagner; he took Wagner’s almost cinematic approach (instead of separate numbers, ending in applause for the singer, the entire opera is one continuous piece of music from start to finish, and the orchestra plays a big part) and applied it to more human and dramatic subjects. These two are psychologically intense one-act works. Salome, an adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play, is about a princess who falls in love with John the Baptist; when he spurns her, she demands his head on a silver platter … and kisses it. Elektra, based on Sophocles, is about a woman who wants to kill her mother to avenge her father’s murder.

Puccini: Turandot (1926). Easily Puccini’s best opera: a fantasy China, glorious choral scenes, pageantry, pomp, processions. And a well-known football anthem.

Or, if you want a challenge: Schoenberg’s Moses and Aron (1957), Zimmermann’s Soldaten (1965), and Stockhausen’s Licht (1977-2003). Twelve-tone atonalism! Avant-garde dissonance! Societal decay! Faith, doubt, and the ineffable! A seven-opera cosmic cycle blending mysticism and philosophy (and helicopters), by a composer who claimed to come from Sirius! In case you wondered whether opera was just pretty songs and emotional melodrama.