Opera
The excessive art that keeps coming back
Description
Opera is the most expensive of the major art forms and one of the strangest. A typical production needs an orchestra, a chorus, soloists, a conductor, a stage director, sets, costumes, and a building designed to amplify unaided voices over an orchestra without microphones. The whole apparatus exists to mount, usually, a few weeks of performances. Then it does it again with another work. The economics are punishing, and have been since the form was invented.
The form is also, by the standards of most contemporary taste, ridiculous. People sing their conversations. They sing while dying. They sing arias of indecision that last twenty minutes when a single sentence would do. The plots are often absurd. None of this is incidental it is what opera is — and it is also what makes the form difficult for audiences who arrive expecting realism. Opera is not realistic. It is a four-hundred-year-old experiment in what music and drama can do together when neither is asked to behave.
And yet it keeps coming back. The form was declared dead at least three times in the twentieth century — by modernist composers who thought it exhausted, by economists who thought it too expensive, by critics who thought it a museum piece. The opera houses kept programming it. New works keep being commissioned, with mixed but real success. The form's relationship to the present is complicated, but it is not finished.
The question we're asking: what opera is, why it costs what it costs, and why it persists.
What we'll see: the Florentine origins, the three model composers, the twentieth-century crisis, and the present.
Table of contents
01Florence and Monteverdi
Opera was invented around 1600 in Florence, by a group of intellectuals who called themselves the Camerata. They were trying to recreate, as they understood it, the sung drama of the ancient Greeks, in which they believed the entire text had been delivered in some form of musical speech. The Greek model was largely speculative — the surviving evidence about how Greek tragedy was actually performed is thin but the project they invented in pursuit of it was something genuinely new. They wanted a music that could carry the weight of dramatic speech, that could express specific emotions in specific situations, and that could be sustained across an entire play.
The earliest surviving operas Peri's Euridice from 1600, and a small handful of works from the years immediately after are interesting more as documents than as music. The form found its first major composer in Claudio Monteverdi. His Orfeo, premiered in Mantua in 1607, is the first opera that is still regularly performed and the first that demonstrated what the new genre could actually do. Monteverdi gave the recitative the sung speech that carries the dialogue a flexibility that the early Florentines had not managed, and he gave the arias an emotional intensity that justified their existence as set pieces.
02Three composers, three models
Mozart, in the late eighteenth century, showed what opera could be when the music and the drama were both taken completely seriously. The three operas he wrote with Lorenzo Da Ponte as librettist The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, Così fan tutte in 1790 combined comic and serious registers in a way the form had not previously managed. The characters are recognisably individual people rather than types. The ensembles, where multiple characters sing simultaneously expressing different things, are a technical achievement nobody else of the period could match. The combination remains the standard against which later opera is measured.
Verdi in the nineteenth century built a different kind of opera around the conditions of Italian theatrical life. His operas Rigoletto, La traviata, Aida, Otello, Falstaff were written for a paying public who wanted strong stories, big tunes, and extended scenes for the major voices. The plots are often melodramatic. The music is always direct, always singable, and almost always driven by the dramatic situation rather than by formal pattern. Verdi over a fifty-year career pushed each of the conventions of Italian opera as far as they could go, and his late works in particular are as sophisticated as anything in the repertoire.
03The twentieth-century crisis
The early twentieth century was a difficult moment for opera. The musical language the form had relied on was being broken open by Schoenberg and the modernists. The audiences who had filled the opera houses of the late nineteenth century were ageing. The economic conditions of the European societies that had supported lavish operatic production were changing under the pressure of two world wars. The form had to figure out what it was going to be in a century that had moved past most of its assumptions.
Several composers managed the transition. Strauss continued writing operas Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier that pushed the late Romantic language to its limit without breaking it. Puccini's Turandot, completed posthumously in 1926, gave the Italian tradition one of its most popular works. Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu brought the techniques of Schoenberg's atonality into operatic form and produced two of the most powerful works of the period. Janáček, Britten, and Shostakovich all wrote operas that extended the form without abandoning its capacity to communicate.
04Why it keeps coming back
The contemporary opera scene is in better shape than the doom-laden accounts of twenty years ago suggested. The major houses have stabilised, often through ticket pricing, broadcast revenue, and substantial private and public subsidy. New works are being commissioned at a higher rate than at any point since the Second World War. Composers like John Adams, Kaija Saariaho, George Benjamin, Thomas Adès, Caroline Shaw, and Jeanine Tesori have produced operas in the last twenty years that have entered repertoire. The form is not exactly thriving, but it is producing new work at a rate that suggests it is not finished.
Part of what explains the resilience is technological. Live cinema broadcasts of opera, pioneered by the Met's Live in HD series in 2006 and now standard at most major houses, have expanded the audience for individual productions far beyond what could fit in the theatre. A single Saturday performance of a major Met production might be seen by tens of thousands of people in cinemas across multiple continents. The economics of this are mixed but the cultural reach is substantial. Opera in 2025 has more viewers, in absolute terms, than opera at any earlier point in its history.
05Conclusion
Opera is in a position where the costs are large, the audience is loyal but ageing, and the form keeps producing both new work and renewed productions of the old. The trajectory could go in several directions. The houses could shrink. The form could move further toward broadcast and away from live performance. The new works could find audiences the older ones do not. None of these futures is certain. What is certain is that the form has survived everything that should have killed it for four centuries, and that the music it has produced is still in active use.