Opera Day

Opera Day was founded by a cooperation between OPERA America, Opera Europa, and Ópera Latinoamérica.

Opera developed as part of the classical music tradition in the West, first springing up in Italy and quickly spreading across Europe, including France, England, Germany and Russia.

The first operas aimed to rekindle Ancient Greek drama, especially the role of the chorus, and it wasn’t long before opera became popular entertainment, with the first opera season taking place in Venice in 1637.

This versatile art form has evolved and diverged in numerous ways throughout its history. For much of the 18th century, opera seria, with its elevated style and virtuoso performances, was the prevailing force in Italy.

Yet as with all artistic movements, others reacted against this trend – Mozart is well-known for his comic operas such as The Marriage of Figaro, while Verdi is famous for confident, patriotic operas.

Wagner meanwhile was one of the most influential opera composers, dissolving the distinct recitatives and arias into “endless melody” and developing the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“complete artwork”), a synthesizing of different art forms into one.

Composers in the 20th century continued to push musical boundaries, experimenting with concepts such as atonality and dissonance.

And of course the modern era saw the explosion of musical theater, the younger sister of opera. While there are a number of key differences, some musicals closely resemble opera – look no further than Les Misérables for plenty of recitative passages!

The genre has also influenced current entertainment, with soap operas revolving around personal dramas in much the same way that opera has always done.

Another particularly distinctive aspect of opera is its singing style – opera singers are renowned for their powerful voices, able to belt out melodies to such a volume that they fill a whole opera house without a microphone!

Famous performers include Luciano Pavarotti, Maria Callas, Andrea Bocelli and Jenny Lind (also known as the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ and familiar to modern-day audiences thanks to The Greatest Showman).

Singers are categorized according to their range: male singers with the lowest voices are known as basses while female singers with the highest voices are called sopranos.

In fact, the term prima donna (literally “first woman”) stems from opera, originally meaning the leading female singer but nowadays usually meaning someone who’s a bit of a diva!

Of course, what we all really want to know is whether opera singers can truly shatter glass – and it turns out they can!

By singing at the same resonance of very fine glass, opera singers are able to reach a volume at which the vibrations generated cause the glass to break.

The trick takes volumes of over 100 decibels (normal speech being around 50) and requires years of training, so probably not one to try at home – plus spare your neighbors!