Because I can't spam the classical music thread with all the vocal music I want to. So...take the title a bit loosely. Oratorio is welcome. On my 21st last weekend I saw Werther for the first time! And I had an amazing seat, because I got a last minute ticket and the opera house just sells all the remaining great seats to young people on the night for relatively cheap. So I was centre, row 5. Close enough to see how hot the conductor was. The singing was great, the production was suuuuuper conventional, acting highly variable. But what great music. Laisse couler mes larmes is on my "to sing" list now, as is the letter scene before it. Edit: Also Charlotte gives me enormous Maggie Tulliver feelings. Leaving you with:
@EulersBidentity please teach me about Opera, I keep meaning to get into it and then I don't. Please.
Yo I can make you a starter kit! Haha. Do you have any existing preferences (not necessarily musical, e.g. "has genderfuckery", "not about knights", "tragic/comic/romantic", "no dying of sadness")?
You are wonderful, and um. Genderfuckery sounds cool, if that's an option. Do operas.....tend to be about knights? I don't really know much about them. Except one time I saw Brundibar and I think it was an opera? Pretty much, whatever has the coolest music and will make me jump around babbling incoherently about how cool leitmotifs are. Thank you so much!
Operas about knights I can name from the top of my head: Rinaldo, Parsifal, Lohengrin. I'm sure there's more...something about heroism and chastity that really appealed to certain composers :Y I haven't seen Brundibar! But I know some kids who put it on a couple of years ago. It sounded like a really cool project, and I was sorry I had to miss it. How long's your attention span? Mine is short as heck, but also opera is usually way more effective in full than chopped up into bits. Fortunately there's a pretty solid set of pirated filmed opera on youtube. In any case it's gotten late here and I have work in the morning, so I'm going to get some sleep & find you some clips in the morning :) Edit: to add. Operas tend to be about whatever it was fashionable for opera to be about during the time period when it was written. So Handel, who wrote Rinaldo, was writing in that heroic chastity era. And Wagner, who wrote Parsifal and Lohengrin, he...well, he was just a misogynistic Nazi Norse/Arthurian legend fanboy.
Brundibar was absolutely fantastic! A bunch of my friends were in it and they're trained opera people so. My attention span is decently long if I'm interested in something. I can probably sit through an opera easily as long as it doesn't objectively suck, and I trust you not to send me anything like that. Sleep well!
Surely someone's written an opera about Tristan and Isolde... Other common themes: marriage love triangles making fun of the upper class sucking up to the aristocracy (also combined with the above) war (usually combined with love) beautiful women dying beautiful men dying everybody dying half of Shakespeare's plays (at least) the world sucks (often German or Russian) ... this is making me want to trawl TVTropes ... I tend to recommend either something fall-down hilarious or something incredibly heart-wrenching as a first opera. I was in Marriage of Figaro last fall, so that's on my mind, and (I think) it's great. I was also in Turandot last spring, but that's considerably darker (starts off with an execution!)... La bohème is a classic (this is the opera Rent was based off of), I listened to it a bunch when I was first getting into opera...
Rude opinion time: I don't like Puccini. I haven't seen Turandot start to finish though, so I should do that at some point. In terms of heart-wrenching, Eugene Onegin is one of my favourite operas of all time.
Aight! I grabbed some videos off youtube. These are full operas; if you'd prefer some short clips to get an idea I can also do that! I did my best to find versions with good quality video and captions in English, but I can't make any guarantees about the quality of the production! Because I haven't watched them all any of them. Rodelinda by G.F. Handel. What to expect: court intrigue, murder, happy ending. Spoiler: Video If you like this, you may like: Handel Rinaldo; Purcell The Fairy Queen Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) by W.A. Mozart. What to expect: workplace sexual harassment, crossdressing, happy ending. Spoiler: Video If you like this, you may like: Mozart Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte; Rossini Il barbiere di Siviglia; La Traviata by G. Verdi (this production looks terrible. Sorry) What to expect: Romance, tragedy, courtesans. Spoiler: Video If you like this, you may like: Puccini La Bohème; Offenbach Les Contes d'Hoffmann; Massenet Werther Parsifal by R. Wagner (this one goes in a section by itself because really, who is like Wagner but Wagner?) What to expect: knights, witchcraft, misogyny. Spoiler: Video If you like this, you may like: Wagner Der Ring des Nibelungen (opera cycle); Tristan und Isolde and as a post-script, because I love it and I cry every time: Eugene Onegin by P.I. Tchaikovsky What to expect: TRAGEDY. HEARTBREAK. A DUEL. THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LOVE BEFORE DUTY. Spoiler: Video Edit: If you like Hamilton, you'll probably like Eugene Onegin.
Talking about an opera which requires a CW for rape and suicide. I'm going to see a Britten opera put on by some Oxford students next weekend and I've been listening to it the last couple of days to familiarise myself and it is the shit. Heck. What interesting music. What a lot of mezzo roles. It's The Rape of Lucretia (Roman legend: Lucretia was a matron who killed herself after she was raped by a prince, which led to the downfall of the Roman monarchy and the establishment of the Republic).
