Thanks for the replies to my post so far.

I stick with my opinions. I listen to a Handel opera, say, and although I could happily do without applause at the end of arias, I can accept it because the music was written with breaks before the next recitative. This format works fine, I think, but in the 19th century onwards into the 20th composers started to try to eliminate this stop-start situation and especially in German opera a continuous arioso flow was developed. Clapping whilst the orchestra is still playing is an insult to the musicians and the composer.

My next rant is the Overture/Prelude, if there is one. A few decades ago, the audience would sit through the music with the curtain down until the overture ended.

Now, I am not saying that everybody was listening to the orchestra with rapt attention, but there were at least some.

Now, it seems that we can't do without a visual element and up comes the curtain whilst the conductor is still searching for his or her baton.We are then treated to some sort of mime scene, maybe a ballet, but generally a distracting scene which will usually leave you baffled as to its relevance to the opera. You can always close your eyes, of course;

Ok so there is a song we sing to the neighbor’s dog (whose name is barnabas) and it goes, in a very high octave: BARNABAS! vicTORIOUS! which obviously are not the actual words (those are, i believe, in latin). Anyway we’ve been doing it for long enough that no one remembers where it came from. Maybe faust or carmina burana?

I was not super excited about a romantic comedy because I don't really go for those in general. Plus Elisir seemed very love-it-or-hate-it from past discussions in this sub. But I'm part of TDO's Crescendo membership program for people under 45, which means two free tickets a season, and I know that attendance metrics can be just as important as box office revenue, so why not? Live opera is a good way to kill a Sunday afternoon.

Y'all it was SO GOOD. The cast was fantastic. I'm not really a music person so I can't debate nuances of like, tone or vibrato or all that, but the performances were ON POINT. There was a lot of physical background comedy that just elevated every silly scene and a lot of really great prop work. Everyone in this opera is dumb as a box of rocks and it was just so fun. I think this is the first opera I've seen where no one died. Comedy can be so so so hit or miss but this was just executed perfectly.

It's the production that was at Santa Fe in 2024, riffing on post-war cinema. Nemorino is a car mechanic and the soldiers are American troops stationed in Italy. Very bright and colorful. Soraya Mafi was Adina and Anthony León was excellent as Nemorino.

Behind me was a child who kept asking her parents questions about what was happening on stage, but she was whispering and clearly could follow the supertitles, so it was endearing rather than annoying (to me). The couple next to me seemed like they weren't regular operagoers just from overhearing some of their conversation but they were clearly having a great time. And I liked it a heck of a lot more than I was expecting to, because it was genuinely hilarious and kind of refreshing to have a plot where everyone is basically a good guy and the only stress is stupidity but you know everything's going to work out in the end.

(My only beef with TDO is sometimes the orchestra seems louder than the singers to the point of overpowering them, but I've noticed that across multiple productions/conductors so I'm not sure if it's an issue with building acoustics, blocking, or maybe I have an auditory processing issue. Minor complaint, only happena a few times a show. It's not bad enough to detract away from an excellent production.)

I don't have a conclusion here uhhhhhh Elisir is a good starter opera for the uninitiated, support your local opera company and don't avoid stuff outside your usual genre!

Going to Don Giovani at Lyric in Chicago. Afternoon performance if that matters. What is the typical dress code?

O'Keeffe: Kiss the Sky – Premiering March 12, 2027 by the Washington National Opera at Harman Hall (Shakespeare Theatre Company) in Washington, D.C. This novel "ballet-opera" traces the journey of legendary American modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe. It features music by Grammy Award-winning composer Christopher Tin, a libretto by Kelley Rourke, direction by Francesca Zambello, and choreography by Jessica Lang, starring Isabel Leonard as O'Keeffe.

- John Lewis: Good Trouble – Premiering June 18, 2027 by the Cincinnati Opera at Music Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio. This work is the second commission in the company's Black Opera Project, featuring music by Maria Thompson Corley and a libretto by Diana Solomon-Glover, chronicling the life of civil rights icon U.S. Congressman John Lewis.

- Safe Haven – Premiering during the May 22 – June 27, 2027 festival season by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) in Saint Louis, Missouri. This new American opera features music by Tobias Picker and a libretto by Aryeh Lev Stollman.

- Sitcom – Premiering in May 2027 by Opera Philadelphia. Created by composer Luke Styles and librettist Alan McKendrick, this episodic opera co-opts the television sitcom format into 30-minute stage episodes.

Hello everyone,

I'm "working" on an opera memes page on Instagram and would like to see if anyone is interested in joining and be part of it.

Here's the link: https://www.instagram.com/shutupandaria?exln=OXFhNjJnejc1c2Y2

Every time I listen to opera, or sing opera I am drenched in sweat. I had my first opera lesson and was soaked by the end. I will often cry while singing but I don’t really get super sweaty. I’ve never had this happen before. I have also discovered my voice has a huge range, E3 to F#6, that’s not a typo, that is my range that can go over a full orchestra, otherwise it would be closer to C3. I only started singing opera a few weeks ago and I am so surprised by all of this, though I’ve been a singer all my life. Has anyone else had a similar response? Or a similar experience? It feels like this is some sort of calling, or maybe I’m just going crazy 😅😂 Any way to mitigate the sweating?

Anyone have a promo code for attending this season. Ticket prices are dramatically higher compared to previous years. 80$ for family circle is absurd

Did anyone else see it? Thoughts? I loved the musical direction and personenregie. Stage was 50/50 though. I loved the banquet third act, but what was with the immolation scene?

Spoiler:

Brunnhilde is alone in the stage with a hobby horse. I loved the focus on her and I know the music speaks for itself, but come the destruction of Valhalla, she just spins in place on the empty stage while there's a spotlight on the ring on the floor. No fire, no anything... They had a projection system that they just turned off??? After an excellent and dynamic start to the third act, the staging and her acting undercut the biggest moment of the Ring, and the finale felt deeply anticlimactic.

So here's a bit of an odd one, I was flipping through TV channels and heard La donna è mobile being used to sell pasta. Because nothing screams pasta than the misogynistic rambling of a Duke who thinks all women are sluts. I've seen Libiamo ne' lieti calici used to sell life insurance and God help me the number of things done to the poor Toreador Song.

But I want some opinions, what is the piece of music from an opera most misused or incorrectly used. What piece have you heard most frequently abused to the point it should probably file a restraining order against the advertising industry?

I'll give mine. Trump started using Nessun Dorma. Let's not talk about the man himself, I have my VERY strong opinions on him. Let's focus on context. The song is a song of hope for victory....while everyone is afraid they're all going to die. The song is about how no one can sleep because they're scared of death, but hey Calaf is doing alright!

Actually that fits Trump in spirit.

It was a song I found very...ill chosen, unless the goal was to tell people to be afraid they'd all die. But they kept using it, seemingly oblivious to everything except Calaf declaring he would win, kind of missing the point.

So what all have you guys found?

Allan Clayton has left the production. Sean Panikkar, originally scheduled to sing Števa, will now take over the role of Laca, and Ryan Capozzo, originally Panikkar’s cover, will sing Števa for all performances.

Top of the list: Clapping whilst the music is still playing.

There are two things here: Clapping at the end of an act just as the singing stops and the orchestra is left playing amongst the applause.

Secondly, and a lot worse, clapping immediately after the completion of an aria when there is no break in the score.

A terrible example of this was a video of Tosca with Josef Kaufman singing 'e lucevan le stelle' in Act 3. At the end the conductor actually put down his baton making no attempt to carry on. There then followed 7 minutes of applause during which the poor tenor had to maintain the appearance of a man knowing he was about to be executed. Inevitably, he eventually sang the aria again, and this time the conductor actually allowed the music to continue and let Tosca rush on stage.

There is no break in the musical score here, in fact the aria concludes and the orchestra continues the link to the next scene.

The whole thing completely disrupted any continuity in the story.

Clapping after arias in the Italian baroque was a different matter, each aria having a break before the next recitative, and the audience would show their opinion, good or bad.

In the I9th century composers tried to move to a more continuous score, and you don't get any chance to applaud in the middle of the Ring Cycle, for example.

Italian opera goers still seem on average to think that opera is just about singing.

I will post further hates but I suspect this post is getting too long already.

I'm interested in following along with the score but I cannot find it anywhere! Would anyone happen to have it?

I have an extra ticket for today performance at Covent Garden at 3 PM. Seat CC 15. 27 quid.

It's my understanding that Italian uses a really bright Ah sound, and us North Americans tend to accidentally move it back to our American Ah (aww) sound.

In this video is the Ah's at the end of words correct? As in, I think I could sing an even brighter ah then Adolfo Corrado here.

1:15 Ma, to me sounds like maw. But is definitely very open. But the end of Spania sounds more like muh instead of mah.

Like definitely "Span" is ah but the last a vowel sounds like uh (Spani-uh).

What's correct? I've read the 2nd edition of handbook diction for singers (the one that Scores Unstitched threw in the garbage! :O )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib4Q-NRB0EI

(For context, I’m an undergrad vocal performance major and I’ve seen a few operas live before this)

I just watched La bohéme for the first time (2025 Met recording) with some friends, and I feel like I didn’t really get it? I hate to say it, but I don’t think I liked it 😭 and I wanted to.

I’ve seen a lot of people recommend it as a good first opera due to the music and story, which I agree—I think the plot is fairly simple, and I enjoyed the music decently well. I’ve sung “Vecchia zimarra senti” before (I feel like every undergrad bass/baritone has done it lmfao), and that was really the extent of its music I’d heard before. The only plot I knew was that Mimì was sick and I knew RENT was loosely based on it.

But watching it, I was shocked at how little happened in the story!! Acts 2 and 3 flew by super quickly, Mimì and Rodolfo’s relationship felt incredibly rushed (granted that’s normal for opera, I just couldn’t buy them falling in love in the span of like 10 minutes) + they had almost zero chemistry, and Mimì’s sickness isn’t addressed until Act 3 and they don’t do anything about it until the END OF ACT 4!!! Colline’s aria also feels like a last-minute addition—I recognize that it’s meant to be a large gesture because he has so little, but it felt like it had less emotional weight than Musetta selling her earrings. Not to mention the ending is so bleak, which I assume is the intent, but when the characters do NOTHING for almost the whole show, it doesn’t feel like there’s enough buildup for me to care that much about her dying.

I don’t know if it’s just the production I watched or the story itself, but I didn’t particularly care about anyone other than Marcello and Musetta’s relationship. Does anyone else feel like this, or did I just miss the point of the opera? Is there a recording you prefer more?

I think this production of the Giuseppe Verdi comic opera is a great way to celebrate the composer today. Hope you enjoy!

Filming Location: BUFA Studios in Berlin, Germany (1979). Director: Götz Friedrich. Conductor: Sir Georg Solti, leading the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera Chorus. Main Cast: Gabriel Bacquier as Sir John Falstaff, Richard Stilwell as Ford, and Karan Armstrong as Alice Ford.

Sung in Italian, with English subtitles. (German subtitles are also available.) The synopsis is narrated in German, which also has subtitles.

The link — https://youtu.be/We0heyFkqXU

This is borrowing from a couple of comments I just wrote, but in short I do kind of disagree with the idea of it being a "boy meets girl" story. It's a bit simplified for something that actually can be played with lots of nuance and astonishing realism. There are many, many problems with the opera and honestly more than I can explain a couple paragraphs, but there's surprising nuance for almost everyone invovled.

This is borrowed from a comment itself.

To be very fair, I don't Rodolfo cares deeply for Mimi until when she is actually dying in front of him, and he's dealing with both that and the thought of losing her forever. When it comes to pushing her away and asking her to take a wealthy lover, I feel like it's not something that takes a deep love to do. It's more or less the right thing to do, in a way, because I'd feel like I was killing someone if they could be with someone else and get treated but choose to stay with me. In Act IV when she's dying, telling him that the little deceptions don't matter, and she was happy that she shared those moments with him, I think that's when everything come crashing down because this girl in front of him knows everything he did was insincere and didn't care, because she liked him back, whether or not he actually had genuine feelings. He's built this entire grandoise personality in front of her but she's able to see through it easily (and she's happily playing along), which actually goes back to what I said about Mimi being a lot less naive than she puts on. So what I think is that he's thinking back to all the times he's hurt her but he's now realizing that he probably hurt her much more than he thought as well, and there's no way for him to make it right anymore, because he knows deep down that she's dying.

I've done the music for both Mimi and Musetta, so allow me to indulge a bit. Both characters, when played well, are very good at heart but present themselves differently. Mimi's a lot more controlled with what she lets other people see. When she first meets Rodolfo, she introduces herself as a simple seamstress who embroiders flowers, and then also mentions in passing that she prays to god and lives alone. There is definitely a sense that she's showing him what she thinks he'd want to see, based on what was expected of women at the time, but at the very end she also tells him that she saw through everything he was doing to get her to stay with him. She's very perceptive and empathetic, and that's really what makes her so likeable. The moment she hears Musetta sing, it clocks in her that Musetta is still desperately in love with Marcello, and despite all the things that Rodolfo and Marcello have been saying about her, she still has immense sympathy for Musetta and recognizes the intent under the scene she's making. She's actually very smart and knows what she wants, starting with the fact that she knew Rodolfo was hiding her key and asking her to stay on purpose, but she played along because she was attracted to him as well and it didn't really matter if his intentions were less than honorable. It's only on her deathbed where you see her really show this to the other characters, that she's pretending to be asleep to get a moment alone with Rodolfo, and to tell him that yes, she knew he was doing things on purpose to flirt with her, but it's okay because she liked him too and didn't care if it was insincere. Done right it's absolutely devastating because it's such an honest moment where she's just saying that she loves him and doesn't care if he can't reciprocate in the same way, because she's happy with what she had.

Musetta in a way is a lot truer to herself. No matter who she's with, she's always talking about how she'll do what she wants to do, whether that's Alcindoro or Marcello. The moment she sees Marcello she gets upset and tries to make him notice her again, and in Act III when they get into their argument she just throws whatever punches she has when she doesn't like how he's acting. It gets pretty ugly. It also makes her act of kindness in Act IV more significant because when you're looking at someone who always does and gets what she wants, you know that in the moment sacrificing her vanity for Mimi is exactly what she wants, and it really shows that she's absolutely a good person at heart, no matter how stubborn (and often, toxic) she can be sometimes. Even though she loves pretty things, it's clear that she values the people around her more. Canonically, Mimi and Musetta barely exchange any lines, so it comes across as a genuine act of kindness because it's just someone she knows because her partner's friend happened to see this girl for a few months. But in that moment, even though what they're doing is probably futile, she still wants to give any help that she can.

Saw this last night. Terrific production, great action scenes and choreo, excellent acoustically enhancing set , TERRIFIC Quinn Kelsey and chorus! The sparks were flying -- musically and literally.