The World's First Opera

Opera (opera) is the music (vocal and instrumental), drama (play and performance), literature (poetry), dance (folk dance and ballet), stage art and other integrated art, usually by aria, declamation, repetition, chorus, overture, interlude, dance scenes, etc. (and sometimes with speech and recitation). Origins edit this section As early as in the ancient Greek drama, there is a chorus of singing, some recitation and even in the form of singing; the Middle Ages to religious stories as the theme, to promote religious views of the miracle plays and so on is also incense, and continuously. But really called "music drama" of modern Western opera, but the end of the 16th century, the early 17th century, with the Renaissance secularization of music and culture should be produced.

It is generally believed that the European opera arose in the late 16th century. The first opera recognized in the West, is under the influence of humanism, an attempt to restore the spirit of ancient Greek drama and produced "Daphne" (also translated as "Daphne"), librettist o. Rinuccini, composer j. Perry and j. Corsi, in 1597 (said to have been completed in 1594) in Florence g. Baldi counts of the court of the performance, due to the play of the original manuscripts of the loss of the reasons, some people also put the year 1600 Due to the loss of the original manuscript, some people regard Eurydice, written in 1600 to celebrate the marriage of Henry IV, as the earliest Western opera. The popularity of opera led to the creation of the world's first opera house in Venice in 1637. Development Edit Paragraph At the end of the 17th century, the most influential in Rome was the Neapolitan opera school represented by Ya?6?1 Scarlatti. This school did not use choral and ballet scenes in their operas, but highly developed the solo technique, which was later called "beautiful voice". When this style of "singers only" went to the extreme, the original dramatic expression and ideological connotation of the opera was almost lost. Thus, in the 18th century and 20s, there was the rise of the genre of comic opera, which was based on everyday life, with witty plots and simple music. The first model of Italian comic opera is Pagolesi's "The Maid as Housewife" (premiered in 1733), which was originally an opera interlude, and when it was staged in Paris in 1752, it was denigrated by the conservatives, thus setting off the famous "Comedy and Opera Polemics" in the history of opera. Out of Rousseau's handwriting, France's first comedy opera, "The Village Soothsayer" was born under the inspiration of this debate and this opera.

Italian opera was the first to be adapted in France and to be integrated into the French national culture. Lully, the founder of French opera ("lyrical tragedy"), pioneered the use of ballet scenes in opera, in addition to creating solo melodies that were closely tied to the French language. In England, Purcell created the first English national opera, Didon and Aeneas, based on his country's masque tradition. In Germany and Austria, it was Haydn, Dietersdorf, Mozart and others who developed folk singing opera into German and Austrian national opera, represented by Mozart's The Magic Flute. To the 18th century, Gluck, in response to the mediocrity and superficiality of the Neapolitan opera at that time, argued that the opera must have profound content, music and drama must be unified, and the performance should be pure and natural. His ideas and works such as Orfeo and Eurydice and Iphigenia in Oleander had a great influence on the development of later operas.

After the 19th century, Italian masters such as G. Rossini, G. Verdi, G. Puccini, German R. Wagner, French G. Bizet, Russian M.I. Glinka, M.P. Mussorgsky, P.N. Tchaikovsky and so on made important contributions to the development of the opera. The "light opera" (operettta, meaning "small opera"), which took shape in the 18th century, has evolved and developed into an independent genre. It is characterized by a short structure, popular music, and the use of narration in addition to solos, repetitions, choruses, and dances. The Austrian composer Sobey and the French composer Orpheus Bach, who was originally from Germany, were the founders of this genre.

In the 20th century, among the opera composers, the early representatives were Richard Strauss, who was influenced by Wagner ("Salome", "Knight of the Roses"); after the First World War, it was Berg, who applied the principle of atonality to the creation of operas (Wojciech); and in the 1940s so far there were: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Miejow, Mannotti, Barbier, Orff, Giannasdella, Henze, Moore and the famous British composer Britten.