30 Mar /16

Opera

Opera - Word of the day - EVS Translations
Opera – Word of the day – EVS Translations

No, not the Opera browser, the performance art. Wait! Before you roll your eyes, maybe it is time that you gave opera a chance. Often thought of as the pinnacle of performance art, opera stimulates the ears through music, the eyes through elaborate setting and stage designs, and the mind through the stories being portrayed.

Beginning with the word itself, opera is a direct import from Italian, which takes the word directly from Latin. First used in Italian in 1639, its dual meaning of  “work” as in the effort as well as the product, is a combination of the forms of the Latin word opera which, when singular, represents “work or labour,” and, when plural (opus), represents “a product or result of labour.”

Interestingly, while many cultures have, over the years, taken the prototypical Italian opera and adapted it with their own styling, such as the Germans, French, and Anglo-Americans, the word is still used as a blanket term for the genre.

Having a storied past, many consider opera an archaic form of art; however, though the classics still dominate, there are also new and emerging composers, artists, and plots. The first opera, Dafne, was written in the twilight of the 1500s by a Florentine group, who referred to themselves as Camerata de’ Bardi, as a late Renaissance attempt at reviving the Greek drama of antiquity. While this initial work is, sadly, non-extant, many of the older, classic operas, such as those by Verdi (La traviata, 1853), Puccini (La boheme, 1896), Mozart (The Magic Flute, 1791), Bizet (Carmen, 1875), are still the most popular, with the aforementioned 4 being responsible for 2,586 productions and almost 13,000 performances in 2013/14. Far from being a static art from the past, though it is hard to match the classics and titans of the opera, the top 10 living composers from the same period represent 300+ productions and nearly 1,300 performances.

Less than a decade after the word was first used in Italy, it arrived in English, via John Raymond, who wrote in 1648 that, “A week after our arrival at Sienna, was an Opera represented..with several changes of Scenes,..and other Machines, at which the Italians are spoke to be excellent.” Nothing how “regional” variations of opera had developed, The (British) Daily Chronicle commented in 1909 how, “In France the opera was the outcome of the ballet, and in England of the masque.”

Unfortunately, while many in the present day have closed themselves off from opera, seeing it as too unnecessary or too much of a spectacle, there is more than enough reasons to enjoy the sensual splendour that is opera, as the poet W.H. Auden said: “No good opera plot can be sensible. … People do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”