Who appropriate: "There's no better mirror reflects the image of man than his words."
Juan Luis Vives
From the Opera. (Series of 3, second edition)
Opera. Not easy, is not easy, to write about size issue in a nutshell, in a few lines. Opera, small problem. Close your eyes and imagine an empty stage, a ray of light falls on the drawing, a portrait of someone. A being who sings, who sings like few things can sing. Also on one side is blurred, at least, an instrument to accompany him, usually a piano and the performer.
He or she sings. Aria grows between the voice and us, captivates, thrills us, makes us laugh, makes us come to tears. But that is just the beginning, Opera needs an orchestra, costumes, props, special lighting effects, tailors, hairdressers, makeup artists, shoemakers, a stage director, music director, so many things and, especially, the singers
"A naked man across the room and another watching" defined Peter Brook theater, this definition falls short is Opera. The grand opera was born, born hybrid constantly created and recreated, Opera is complicated, bizarre, absurd and bourgeois. She was the daughter of the nobles, the bourgeoisie, the rich and the nouveau riche.
Opera is grand, you need only look at the great theaters, exquisite jewelry massive chests that hide like jewelers immense. La Fenice, La Scala, Rome Opera, Covent Garden, The Metropolitan , The Colon, El Real, l ' Opéra Bastille , The Lyceum, The Sydney Opera House, Opera House
Opera is a hybrid art is total, it more complex and binding harmonic of all sciences. Acoustics, pure mathematics, architecture, physics, chemistry, astronomy, there are so many stars and stars of various weight-, quantum mechanics, if everything is displacement wave, my friend give me reason Planck-, biology and so bulky. Everything. Everything is there to make us an unforgettable moment, a memorable moment while we see that being, to those beings known singers, like mediums, bring, or lead us to other places, other circumstances, other lives.
In Opera we mourn, laugh. We need to get off the ground, and we do thank to that mix of music and poetry gives us emotion.
is in them, these beings, the singers, where La Opera is the indestructible force that makes for over 400 years. Artists leave the stage without a net, with the main asset of his voice and the only purpose of transforming the pure air in tear fluid. They are exposed, who give a measure of risk, those that survive opera for ever and ever. They have founded and styles represented, resurface sows have risen roles and ways of understanding the song.
Let history not an easy task and terribly pretentious to me, is how to summarize the story in a couple of pages. But there I am bold and released:
Italian Opera was born and had his century and was the eighteenth century, the reign of the castrati. They were the primary star of an art which would then evolve toward a more human, without previous surgical atrocities. They will be expanding operations across Europe, became the first of a flourishing art divas needed idols.
Farinelli was the time, his duels with the trumpets were screaming with joy half Bologna, Cafarelli and its riots in Rome, Senesino, a favorite of Handel. They marked the likes of Venice, Naples, Vienna, London at the time.
Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Caldara, Georg Friedrich Handel and their respective operations performed only by men ... you know, the Catholic and Apostolic Church, and all possible-aholics strikes again. Sorry ... for the greater glory of God.
Then came Gluck, Haydn and, above all, Mozart. German-born opera singers and became secondary. Appears composer, eclipsing his figure unleashing the madness in Hamburg, Vienna, Salzburg, Prague, reigning in what remained of the eighteenth century.
arrives XIX. His majesty is named after Gioacchino Rossini. With him Opera becomes something akin to gluttony and lust, no matter in what order. With Rossini no choice but to sing well, with expression, grace and feeling. Just one example: Pesaro wrote sadistic "Cessa di pui resistere" to The Barber of Seville, a real risk to the rope of the tenor. Nobody sang it from making decades on stage, until it arrived, thanks to the gods, a wonderful Juan Diego Flórez. Life is fair and there is celestial mechanics.
Another thing is Donizetti and Bellini, is the blend of art and virtuosity. Its smooth vocalism, expressive and often dramatic. The bel canto at its best.
appears Verdi, with a completely different way to understand the song and spectacle. The baritone regain strength and the leadership that once gave Mozart and the bel canto was traded to the background. While it proposes and provides fields of expression, a Macbeth, even festive, it also creates a Violeta Valery, fetish role for any soprano, with its dramatic nuances. With Verdi complex psychology appears deranged characters and deep intention arguments. With it comes the political and nationalist opera. Thing that is taken up by the Russians Glinka, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov's masterpiece of the genre, Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky
At the same time of Verdi, Richard Wagner comes a concept and work of art . Verdi and Wagner used his art as a weapon of cultural expansion, incubated with a nation. Italy and Germany. The two accounted for the culmination of the composer and leading figure of the nineteenth century.
The end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, things get complicated. Operetta, Zarzuela, the musical ... and I would not end ever.
connoisseurs say that the nineteenth century was that of the composers, singers XX and XXI century will be the directors. I would say that the twentieth century was also one of the great conductors, Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti, Claudio Abbado, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Sir Colin Davis, Seiji Ozawa, Daniel Barenboim, Riccardo Muti and others . Arturo Toscanini , director nothing complacent, less graceful minds classified into three grades : "Foolish, very foolish and tenor" ... on the comments.
special mention of the Stage Directors: Calixto Bieito, Peter Brook, Roberto De Simone, Giancarlo del Monaco, Eduardo Diago, Achim Freyer, Denis Krief, John Pascoe, Luchino Visconti, Carlos Wagner, Petr Weigl, Robert Wilson, Jonathan Miller, Francesca Zambello, Michal Znaniecki and I'm short.
A friend, Migdalia, I said: "I was about eight when I heard the Habanera from Carmen and do not know why, but that voice has changed my life."
Y Whose was that voice?
If something in life was assured Maria Cecilia Sophia Anna Kalogeropoulos, for intimate Maria Callas or simply "La Callas", having suffered all the calamities and failing the aspiration of every human being, be happy, it was her legendary character. Born in New York in 1923. In the early forties, suffered the humiliation of being rejected and can not play the role of Cio-Cio-San in fat. It weighed about 100 kilos. So Donita Guarama had in a year lost weight 37 kilos to sing The Vestale of Gaspare Spontini, Milan, and as a stage director Visconti. He died alone in Paris, at age 53 after suffering the loss of a child, abandonment of Onassis. All Gaussian distribution was his life. A life that would be worth a good opera libretto
. 
Anecdotes in Opera, thousands, tens of thousands. To sample preguntenselo the tenor Roberto Alagna, who could not stand the screams of the audience, leaving the mezzo-soprano Ildiko Komlosi "Povera donna, alone, in questo abbandonata, populous desert" in the middle second act, in the version italianísima Aida at La Scala, with a discreet Franco Zeffirelli as a stage director in December 2006
My Opera: La Bohème "Empress remember? -, La Cenerentola, with the Cheshire Cat smile to my side, "Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, La Traviata, Carmen, Boris Godunov, The Elixir of Love, The Barber of Seville-Madrid-terrible, Lucia de Lammermoor, Turandot, El Caballero de la Rosa, Dialogue of the Carmelites Aida, Madame Butterfly, Norma, Tosca, The Magic Flute ...
Time changes, this is no longer necessary to go to the theater, opera and enjoy that rare charm. The video, CD and even internet brings us to our room all the magnificence of the beautiful ... but I prefer to see there, before me, bathed in that light.
When the oboe breaks the air with the natural and the orchestra tunes, I know I will start a ritual that takes me, like in dreams, the premiere of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, over in Mantua 1607, and come to me my ghosts. Their names, including many others: Tito Gobbi, Cesare Siepi, Luigi Alva, Juan Diego Flórez -singing, insist, as a God-Anna kasya, Joan Sutherland, his fa memorable treble as the Queen of the Night The Magic Flute, " Beverly Sills, Edita Gruberova -singing a sublime Lucia, for twenty years, with all my flats two treble, and increasingly well-sung, Mariella Devia, Montserrat Caballe, the only Madame Butterfly has been married to his Pinkerton, "Renata Tebaldi, Cecilia Bartoli, José Carreras, Nicolai Gedda, my beloved Natalie Dessay-drawn as a complex personality disorder of an impressionist painting apparent," Sumi Jo, Renata Scotto, Jose Cura, very low bass Boris Christoff-no Boris Godunov as the Superfriends "and inseparable ... Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi ...
'm also clear, sometimes Opera is a brick. For example, supporting all hours of Wagner's tetralogy, and then understand it fully, suicide. But it also has its charm.
All the best for you.
PS: For those hoping to "From the opera" a tearful post, sorry. And in the world there are enough cheap melodramas that with a little music and good singers would work the miracle.
Note: East post. "That music away ..."
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