Explore by Style

Baroque

• Invention of Opera
• Claudio Monteverdi
• Francesco Cavalli 
• Henry Purcell
• Leonardo Vinci
• George Frideric Handel
• Jean-Philippe Rameau

Classic

• Christoph Willibald Gluck
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart   
• Franz Joseph Haydn
• Ludwig von Beethoven

Bal Canto

• Gioachino Rossini
• Gaetano Donizetti
• Vincenzo Bellini
• Giuseppe Verdi

French Romantic and Grand Opera

• Giacomo Meyerbeer
• Charles Gounod
• Hector Berlioz
• Georges Bizet
• Jacques Offenbach
• Jules Massenet 

International Operetta

• Arthur Sullivan
• Jacques Offenbach
• Johann Strauss II
• Franz Lehar

Russian and Eastern European Romantic

• Mikhail Glinka 
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• Alexander Borodin
• Modest Mussorgsky
• Antonín Dvořak
• Bedřich Smetana
• Leoš Janáček 
• Bela Bartok

Wagner

• Carl Maria von Weber
• Richard Wagner

Post-Wagnerian

• Engelbert Humperdinck
• Richard Strauss

Verismo

• Giacomo Puccini
• Ruggiero) Leoncavallo
• Pietro Mascagni
• Umberto Giordano
• Francesco Cilea

Russian Modern

Igor Stravinsky


Second Viennese School

Schoenberg
Berg

Opera in the Rococo -- the Transition to Mozart

1740-1760 is Handel's oratorio period, when all types of comic operas replaced the public's interest in serious opera. In this period Gluck was a standard Italian opera composer.  Rameau is strong in this period, but for the beginner you should just skip it.  Nothing rises to the level of standard repertoire.


The transition from baroque to classic style, begun in the style galant of Couperin, consisted of

(a) the sudden collapse and disappearance of the German polyphonic style,

(b) a more gradual shift of popular interest away from opera to the new symphony and within opera from the international opera seria to the national comic opera genres and

(c) the establishment of tonality and modulation as the chief means of musical expression.  After this everything is tonal.

Opera seria

Opera seria was still predominant in Italy by Nicola Porpora (1686-1768), Johann Adolf Hasse, "Il Sassone" (1699-1783), and Niccolo Jommelli (1713-74). Important in Berlin was Carl Heinrich Graun's (1703/4-59) Montezuma (1755), and in Vienna Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) wrote 19 operas on librettos by Metastasio.

Opera buffa

Sophisticated librettos by Carlo Goldoni (1707-93) represented contemporary figures in realistic situations with natural voices, therefore, there were

(a) very few castrati,

(b) bass soloists in

(c) secco recitative,

(d) flexible arias and

(e) important ensemble finales.

Works were Il Filisofo di campagna (1754) by Baldassare Galuppi (1706-85), La Buona figliuola (1760) by Niccolo Piccinni (1728-1800), and Gluck's Il Tigrane (1743).

Oratorio

When his opera ventures failed, Handel turned to oratorio in English, beginning with Israel in Egypt (1737), and including Messiah (1742), Samson (1743), Semele (1744), Judas Maccabeus (1746), Solomon (1749), and Jephtha (1752).  He used fewer da capo arias, varied the degree of difficulty in order to use English singers, and adapted English choral polyphony to his own Italianate style. Graun's Der Tod Jesu (1755) was a pale rival.  These works are often presented as staged operas today.

 

Opéra-comique

The enormous popular success of Pergolesi's La serva padrona in Paris in 1752 set off the War of the Buffons between supporters of comic opera and defenders of the grand opera. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) composed Le Devin du village (1752) as a model opéra-comique.

Singspiel

Coffey's English ballad opera The Devil to Pay was sung in Germany in 1743 and then reset by J.C. Standfuss in 1752 as Der Teufel ist los, the first Singspiel.

Explore by the Top 25 Operas

1.  La Traviata, Verdi*
2.  Carmen, Bizet*
3.  La Bohème, Puccini*
4.  The Magic Flute, Mozart*
5.  Tosca, Puccini* 
6.  Madame Butterfly, Puccini*
7.  The Barber of Seville, Rossini*
8.  The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart*
9.  Rigoletto, Verdi*
10. Don Giovanni, Mozart*
11. Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss*
12. Aïda, Verdi*
13. L'elisir d'amore, Donizetti
14. Cosi fan tutte, Mozart*
15. Hänsel und Gretel, Humperdinck
16. Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky
17. Turandot, Puccini*
18. Nabucco, Verdi
19. Pagliacci, Leoncavallo
20. Il trovatore, Verdi
21. Lucia di Lammermoor, Donizetti
22. Die lustige Witwe, Lehár
23. Cavalleria rusticana, Mascagni
24. Un ballo in maschera, Verdi*
25. Otello, Verdi

Leoš Janáček

One of the things that has changed about opera since I began noticing it is that Leoš Janáček (1854 – 1928) has moved into the standard repertoire.

He is considered modern even though his dates fit somewhere around Puccini, who is definitely not considered modern. So what makes him modern? His Czech compatriots, Smetana and Dvorak, went to a lot of trouble to fit into the Romantic idiom of their German colleagues in order to gain acceptance in the mainstream. Janáček clearly didn't do this. He appears to have decided on a specific style based on Moravian melodies and Czech national idioms without particularly caring to seem like everyone else. This bothered his contemporaries, but apparently it doesn't bother us. It's rather like the difference between Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky. Janáček's operas are singable, always a prime consideration, and his plots are about people we recognize.

Charles Mackerras carefully reconstructed the original cut and orchestration for Jenufa after it had been performed for decades in a romantic form, and it is more popular now in this original version. I don't think we hear Janáček as modern. Does he remind you of Bartók, a fellow ethnomusiciologist? Or Berg? He doesn't have the iconoclastic purpose that is the fundamental definition of modernism. He's just doing his own thing. After listening to modernists for decades, we're unthreatened by Janáček. He's comfortable and just different enough to be interesting.

His most popular operas are:

• Jenůfa, #61, libretto by the composer after Gabriela Preissová (1904)

• Katya Kabanova, libretto by Vincenc Červinka, after Alexander Ostrovsky's The Storm (1921 original, 1992 Sir Charles Mackerras version published.) 

• The Cunning Little Vixen, #96, libretto by the composer, after Rudolf Těsnohlídek and Stanislav Lolek (1924) 

• The Makropoulos Affair, libretto by the composer, after Karel Čapek (1926 original, 1964 Sir Charles Mackerras version ) 

• From the House of the Dead, libretto by the composer, after Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1927)