20 peak moments in opera
Pauline Park
I grew up with classical music but not opera and I first fell in love with that ‘exotic and irrational entertainment’ (as Samuel Johnson called it) in my sophomore year in college; more than 40 years later, I love opera more than ever but having seen most of the operas in the standard repertoire, I have become more selective in what I see in the theater. There have been thousands of operas written since 1600, but in my estimation, there are only two or three dozen truly great operas and perhaps another hundred or so that have bits and pieces that are worthwhile; for a list of my 30 favorite operas, see my blog post, “15 favorite operas and 15 more.”
I had a conversation with a friend who was new to opera and decided to put together a list of 20 numbers that are the absolute pinnacle of the art form, in chronological order (but with the Wagner numbers grouped together). To begin with, a little introduction: opera began with the Florentine Camerata and the composers Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, who wrote “Euridice,” performed in Florence on 6 October 1600 at the Palazzo Pitti with Peri himself singing the role of Orfeo.
1 — Claudio Monteverdi is the first great composer in the history of opera and his operas like his madrigals and instrumental music represent the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque. I saw an English National Opera production of his first opera “Orfeo” at the Coliseum in my first week in London in August 1981 and was stunned by the magnificent opening; two years later, in the summer of 1983, I saw Monteverdi’s last opera at the Glyndebourne opera festival on the Sussex Downs. “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” is Monteverdi’s crowning achievement in opera (pun intended) and it closes with the sublime duet between Nero and Poppea, “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo” (I gaze upon you, I adore you).
2 — Baroque opera came to a brilliant climax with the works of Georg Friedrich Händel who — though German — not only mastered the Italian da capo opera form but wrote some of the greatest arias and ensembles in the Italian language — among the most profound expressions of Handelian genius being the duet “Per le porte del tormento” (Through the gates of torment) from “Partenope” (1730).
3 — Handel’s greatest opera is “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” (1724) and Cleopatra’s seduction of Julius Caesar is brilliantly portrayed in “V’adoro pupille” (I adore your eyes).
4 — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — along with Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner — is considered one of the three greatest composers of opera and in his all too short life, he created the operatic repertoire with his first great opera, “Le Nozze di Figaro” (The Marriage of Figaro) (1786) — the first opera never to leave the stage and the beginning of the revolution that would transform the genre by creating out of the ‘sonata-allegro’ form a structure for dramatic movement for the first time in the history of opera. Mozart’s partnership with Lorenzo Da Ponte — arguably the greatest librettist in the history of opera — would produce two more great masterpieces: “Don Giovanni” (1787) and “Così Fan Tutte” (1790).
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7 — Even those who do not know opera would recognize the overture to Giaochino Rossini’s last opera, “Guillaume Tell” — even if they would most likely call it the theme to “The Lone Ranger.” By common consent, “Il Barbiere di Siviglia is Rossini’s greatest opera, but my all-time favorite
8 — “Norma” (1831) is universally considered Vincenzo Bellini’s masterpiece and while I find most of the opera less than compelling, “Casta diva” (Chaste Goddess) — the Druid priestess’s invocation to the moon — is without a doubt the peak of bel canto opera and one of the greatest arias ever written.
9 — Richard Wagner’s operas are all interminably long and boring but each of his great operas has around half an hour or more of music of absolute sublimity.
“Tristan und Isolde” (1865) may well be the most influential opera ever written and the prelude ushers in the dissolution of the diatonicism that was central to European art music (i.e., ‘classical’ music) from Monteverdi to the mid-nineteenth century; but it is the Liebestod (Love Death) (“Mild und leise wie er lächelt“) (Mild and quiet as he smiles) that concludes the opera that is overwhelming in its power and almost makes it worth sitting through several hours of sheer boredom to get to that finale.
10 — “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) (1868) is billed as a comedy but it is surely the unfunniest comedy of all time; six hours or so of sheer boredom are introduced with a rousing overture and concludes with a magnificent Preislied (Prize Song) and is punctuated with one moment of sheer divinity — the quintet “Selig, wie die Sonne” (Blessed, like the sun).
11 — “Götterdämmerung” (Twilight of the Gods) (1876) is the fourth and final installment in “Der Ring des Nibelungen” (The Ring of the Nibelungs) which together constitute by far the longest opera ever written; Rossini quipped that Wagner’s music had great moments but boring quarters of an hour; in the case of this ‘tetralogy,’ it’s not just quarters of an hour — it’s whole hours. Nonetheless, in each of the four operas, there are moments of sheer genius that one cannot imagine anyone but Wagner producing — including Siegfrieds Tod und Trauermarsch (Siegfried’s Death & Funeral Music) near the end of “Götterdämmerung.”
12 — Georges Bizet wrote the most popular opera of all time but sadly died before he could see “Carmen” (1875) become an international sensation and establish itself in the repertoire of every opera house in the world; despite becoming something of a cliché because of its ubiquity and countless mediocre productions over the years, one need only listen to the quintet “Nous avons en tête une affaire” to realize what a work of genius Bizet’s only hit is.
13 — Camille Saint-Saëns is most famous for his “Carnivaux des Animaux” (Carnival of the Animals) but his “Samson et Dalilah” (1877) has one of the greatest seduction scenes in all opera (“Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix“).
14 — Giuseppe Verdi loved William Shakespeare’s plays which he read in Italian translation because he did not read English and Shakespeare inspired Verdi’s last two operas: “Otello” (1887) and “Falstaff” (1893) with Arrigo Boito writing both masterful libretti — one a tragedy that is a fairly straightforward musical adaptation of “Othello” and the other a comedy that is loosely based on “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Henry IV.” For me, the high point of “Otello” is Desdemona’s great scena — “Piangea cantando… Salce, Salce… Ave Maria” (She cried, singing ‘Willow, Willow’; hail Mary) — usually referred to as the “Willow Song & Ave Maria.”
15 — Verdi concluded the greatest career in the history of Italian opera with a German fugue, undoubtedly baffling the audience at its premiere; “Falstaff” is nonetheless thoroughly Italian and in it, he achieved the ‘endless melody’ that Wagner always spoke of but while maintaining interest from beginning to end. “Sul fil d’un soffio etesio” (At the edge of a breath) is one of the few arias in the opera and may well be the most enchanting fairy music in any opera.
16 — “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic Chivalry) (1898) was Pietro Mascagni’s only hit but it became an international sensation and is arguably the greatest one-act opera ever written and often paired with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s one-act opera “Pagliacci” (1892) in an operatic double bill (‘Cav/Pag’); the Intermezzo from ‘Cav’ is the only purely instrumental number I have included in this list because of its transcendent beauty which absolutely captivated me when I played it in my high school orchestra.
17 — “Rusalka” (1901) is the only one of Antonín Dvořák’s operas that is staged outside of Czechia these days and frankly, I do not find it very interesting; but it has one moment of sheer divinity: “Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém” (“Song to the Moon”).
18 — The music of Richard Strauß is the end of the line of German Romanticism and “Der Rosenkavalier” (The Knight of the Rose) (1911) is the culmination of the tradition of German Romantic opera that began with “Der Freischütz” of Carl Maria von Weber (1821). Rosenkavalier has two of the greatest moments in all opera. The first is the Presentation of the Rose scene (“Mir ist die Ehre“).
19 — The second peak is the final trio (“Marie Theres’… Hab’ mir’s gelobt“)
20 — I would argue that Giacomo Puccini managed to achieve what Richard Wagner claimed was his objective ‘endless melody’ but does so in his five greatest operas while keeping the audience fully engaged rather than nodding off. For “Madama Butterfly” (1904), Puccini wrote the greatest love duet in all opera (“Bimba dagli occhi pieni di malia“) (Girl with the eyes full of mischief) whose extraordinary musico-dramatic achievement is not undermined even by the most searching critique of the opera’s problematic Orientalism. “Turandot” (1924) is Puccini’s last and greatest opera and the last Italian opera to secure a place in the repertoire of every major opera company around the world; there are so many great moments in this grandest of grand operas including the tenor aria “Nessun dorma” that Luciano Pavarotti popularized but I would cite the death of Liu as the most moving; the most extraordinarily inventive scene is the quartet “Fermo! Che fai? Notte senza lumicino” (Stop! What are you doing? Night with a little light) with Calàf, Ping, Pang and Pong which demonstrates Puccini’s extraordinary ‘optique du théâtre’ better than any other. Olà, Pang! Olà, Pong!