opera (It., work, but actually plural of Lat. opus, a work; Fr. opéra; Ger. Oper). The term is an abbreviation of opera in musica. Opera is a drama set to mus. to be sung with instr. acc. by singers usually in costume. Recit. or spoken dialogue may separate the numbers, but the essence of opera is that the mus. is integral and is not incidental, as in a ‘musical’ or play with mus.

Although literary dramas and sacre rappresentazione were its precursors in some respects, opera is generally said to have originated in Florence towards the close of the 16th cent. (see Camerata) with the earliest examples by Peri and Caccini. Recit. was the dominant feature, but with Monteverdi, whose operatic career extended from 1607 to 1642, opera developed rapidly, borrowing elements from the madrigal and from the ornate Venetian church mus. The aria became an important element, and in L'incoronazione di Poppea, the insight shown into the humanity of the characters anticipated 19th-cent. developments. Cavalli followed Monteverdi's lead, but a more formal approach was reintroduced by A. Scarlatti, who comp. 115 operas between 1679 and 1725. He introduced instr. acc. for recit. in 1686. During the 17th cent. opera was pioneered in Fr. by Lully and Rameau and in Ger. by Schütz and Keiser. But the next great figure in operatic history was Handel, whose operas were mostly comp. for London (between 1711 and 1741) in the It. opera seria style. His glorious solo arias were written for the brilliant techniques and skills of the great castrato singers of his day and for equally fine sops.; in addition, he imparted a lengthened degree of dramatic tension to the form both in arias and recits. It was left to J. C. Bach in his London operas of the 1760s to restore the ch. to a place in opera, as was done also by Gluck, whose operas were written between 1741 and 1779. Gluck's Orfeo, written for Vienna in 1762, is a revolutionary opera because it exploits to the full the mus. and dramatic possibilities of the lib. Gluck scrapped the da capo aria, which was a primary cause of holding up the dramatic development of the plot, and in his preface to Alceste (1767) he wrote of reducing mus. to its true function ‘which is that of seconding poetry in the expression of sentiments and dramatic situations of a story’. Although opera seria was to reach its culmination with Mozart's Idomeneo (1781), Gluck's reforms effectively killed it off, even if fashion still prevented him from carrying out his theories fully.

Haydn's operas, mostly written for Eszterháza, are rich in mus. content but were eclipsed by the works of genius with which Mozart ended the 18th cent., operas which brought the orch. into the forefront of the art, giving it a whole new dimension. Moreover they were works which defied classification under the old headings of opera seria and opera buffa. After Don Giovanni almost anything was possible.

The beginning of the 19th cent. was given a post-Mozartian sparkle by the brilliance, wit, and zest of Rossini's comic operas, and a generation of remarkable singers was served by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. In Ger. the romantic movt., with its interest in folklore and fantasy, found an operatic spokesman in Weber, whose Der Freischütz, Oberon, and Euryanthe opened the way for the colossal transformation wrought by Wagner, who in his maturity dispensed with the established number opera and converted recit. and aria into a seamless, continuous, and symphonic web of mus., with the orch. almost an extra character on the stage. He preferred the term ‘music drama’ to ‘opera’, wrote his own libs., and viewed opera as an amalgam of all the arts. In one sense his operas were a reaction against the spectacular ‘singers’ operas' of Meyerbeer which he had seen in his Parisian youth. Meyerbeer was Ger., but it is with Paris that he is assoc., enjoying success while the much more talented Berlioz had little operatic success in his lifetime, though his Les Troyens is now recognized as a major masterpiece. The operas of Massenet, Gounod, Bizet, and Saint-Saëns dominated Fr. mus. in the latter half of the 19th cent. But next to Wagner the outstanding figure was Verdi, also born in 1813, who learned much from Donizetti and refined and developed his art, keeping to a number-opera format, from Oberto of 1837-8 to the magical Falstaff of 1889-92.

Nationalist opera was principally an E. European development, beginning with Glinka's A Life for the Tsar in 1836 and continuing with Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Borodin's Prince Igor. Tchaikovsky's operas, of which Eugene Onegin is the best known, were not overtly nationalist, however. Smetana in Bohemia with Dalibor and The Bartered Bride est. a Cz. operatic tradition which reached its apogee in the first quarter of the 20th cent. with the powerful, realistic, and orig. operas of Janáček.

In Ger. the greatest post-Wagnerian figure in opera was Richard Strauss, whose first opera, Guntram, was prod. 1894 and his last, Capriccio, in 1942. He was continually trying to find new ways of reconciling words and mus., several of his works having the advantage of fine libs. by the Austrian poet Hofmannsthal. Other major operas from Ger. and Austria in the 20th cent. were written by Berg (Wozzeck and Lulu), Schoenberg, Pfitzner, Schreker, Korngold, Einem, Orff, and Henze.

After Verdi in It. came the verismo (reality) movt., in which operas, often but not necessarily in contemporary settings, strove to present the harsh realities of the situations with which they dealt. In many cases these derived from the realistic novels of Fr. literature in the late 19th cent., e.g. Zola, but like all such categorizations, verismo is hard to define and it could easily be said that Verdi's La traviata is verismo. However, the term is generally applied to the works of Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Montemezzi, Leoni, and, though he is a special case, to Puccini, whose operas achieved and have retained a wide popularity because of their mus. and dramatic colour and immediate appeal. La bohème in particular is among the most frequently perf. of all operas, with Madama Butterfly running it close.

Opera in Eng. was for many years mainly an imported commodity. Only Purcell's short Dido and Aeneas (1683-4) and the ballad-opera The Beggar's Opera (1728) were of any quality among native products, although Balfe's The Bohemian Girl (1843) achieved popularity. Sullivan wrote a grand opera (Ivanhoe) but won immortality through the light operas written in collab. with Gilbert in which his flair for parody and pastiche could be exploited to the full. Vaughan Williams comp. 5 operas which have excellent mus. qualities but are still held to be dramatically weak. Britten, with Peter Grimes in 1945, showed that Eng. had at last produced a natural operatic composer, as was shown by the eagerness with which these works were also staged abroad. He wrote several operas which needed only a chamber orch. and also developed a genre which he called ‘church parables’. These are midway between opera and medieval morality play. The example of Britten was followed by Tippett, Bennett, Walton, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Oliver, Tavener, Weir, and many others.

In the USA, native opera took even longer than in Brit. to find its feet. Gershwin's Porgy and Bess has a claim to be the first successful Amer. opera. Operas by the It.-born Menotti and by Barber and Argento followed the European tradition, and qualities of exuberance, raciness, and wit which the Americans bring to mus. have been channelled most effectively into the genre of ‘musical’ such as Oklahoma! and Kiss Me Kate. This genre was sophisticated by Sondheim's A Little Night Music. The ‘minimalist’ composers Philip Glass and John Adams have written successful operas, notably the former's Akhnaten and the latter's Nixon in China. A NY Met commission which scored a success was Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles.

Some great composers have written only one opera, the supreme examples being Beethoven, whose Fidelio is regarded by many as the greatest of all operas, and Debussy (Pelléas et Mélisande), while others have written none, e.g. Brahms, Bruckner, Elgar, Mahler, Ives, and Rubbra. Yet opera remains for most composers the greatest and most attractive challenge. With the development of mechanical and elec. techniques and the advance of the stage producer to an importance comparable with that of the cond., the staging of operas has grown more exciting and controversial, and has been exploited in the works of Henze, Maxwell Davies, Ginastera, and others. It has also become more expensive. Finance was a contributory cause of Britten's development of chamber operas, and has also led to the emergence of music theatre, a genre in which works of quasi-operatic character, sometimes involving only one singer or reciter, can be perf. either with a minimum of stage trappings (costumes, etc.) or with none at all but purely as a concert performance. A remarkable example of mus. theatre at its best is Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King. Yet even here it can be argued that 20th-cent. mus. theatre is merely a reversion to Monteverdi's Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.

The term opera not only covers the form of mus. composition but the whole business of performing opera. Thus it embraces the famous opera houses and cos. of It. in Milan, Rome, Naples, and Venice, of other parts of Europe in Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt, Munich, Bayreuth, and Paris, of Russia in Moscow and Leningrad, in the USA in NY and Chicago, and in Eng. in London. Two prin. cos. work in London, the Royal Opera at CG, and ENO at the Coliseum. Outside London there is the summer fest. at Glyndebourne, Sussex, but opera is provided on almost an all-the-year-round basis by the regional cos., Scottish Opera (based in Glasgow), WNO (Cardiff) and Opera North (Leeds). These cos. also tour. There are also many other cos., e.g. GTO and ETO, which provide excellent perfs. and reflect the immense development of operatic life in Britain since 1945. All these activities, except Glyndebourne, are heavily subsidized. Commercial sponsorship of opera has become a valuable and necessary contribution to its continuance.