A night at the opera genre2/12/2023 ![]() ![]() The extravagance of opera is, at least for those who love it, magical, and the magic is arguably even more musical than scenic. The controversial Ring cycle by Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera is only the latest manifestation of this. This old tradition of thrilling invention continues today with the help of complex machines, computers, and digitalization. Stage machinery has been a major attraction from the beginning, with special effects that included erupting volcanoes (in Auber’s La Muette de Portici) and scenery that moved almost cinematically (during the transformation music of Bayreuth’s first Parsifal). Opera plots range across classical mythology and the historical past, both near and remote, as well as non-European cultures seen with European eyes. It emerged from Baroque musical theater in the seventeenth century and grew in popularity in the eighteenth, when human capons, castrated as boys to preserve their angelic voices, became the pop stars of their time. But for its devotees, opera provides an aesthetic and emotional experience unlike any other. Producing an opera can be cripplingly expensive. Its plots are often absurd, and its texts often unintelligible when sung. It uniquely combines theater, narrative, music, and the human voice in extravagant and paradoxical ways. Western culture has produced nothing quite like opera among its privileged art forms. ![]()
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