From Broadway to Opera and back again..

I've been a fan of musical theater from the time I was 5 and listened to my parents cast albums. I travel to NYC several times a year to see things, or rather I used to. In the past 2-3 years have been very disappointing in Broadway terms so I started to check out the Met Opera HD broadcasts and find more and more that I love the opera. It took a bit to get into at first but now I find that I'm turning to opera more and more for my theater fix. The sense of heightened drama, lavish sets and music is proving to be a very satisfying blend while waiting for Broadway to get out of it's creative slump. Anyone else on here fans of both genres?

Updated On: 1/13/13 at 10:50 AM

Uh, check out my screen name.... My favorite opera is The Magic Flute (love Mozart). I'm also a big fan of the Met myself and love the HD broadcasts as I don't live near NYC. I got interested in musical theater first (in High school, when I saw my first show--the national tour of Cats) and then discovered opera a few years later after I saw the movie Amadeus. I have loved both genres now for years. It's not too big a leap from musicals to opera, they are very similar in a lot of ways, especially the more operatic shows like Phantom and Les Miserables. I think it's great that you have discovered the joys of both art forms.

I love opera, so yes.

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I first started appreciating opera once I began working in it. I think getting to be in the rehearsal room and seeing that the singers are indeed thinking about a lot more than just pretty singing is what sealed it. Yes, there is the stigma that opera singers don't act, but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the majority of the time they are singing in a foreign language, and of course the heightened style of the majority of the music that is out there and commonly performed. However, find some Youtube clips of some of the great artists (both classic and modern) performing some of the great arias and scenes and you can see just how much craft there really is to it.

You really have to look beyond the pop-culture stereotype of what opera is. For instance, before I really began delving into the repertoire I was under the belief that the famous "mad" scenes were a bunch of sopranos wailing and gnashing their teeth to the high heavens. Yet one of the most famous, Lucia's mad scene towards the end of Lucia di Lammermoor is an exercise in control and precision. And it's the moments like that that give me chills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX2r8ps9pUg

Anna Netrebko's performance of Lucia's mad scene, in the Met's production directed by Mary Zimmerman.

I have been expanding my horizons and this year I started really listening to opera. La Boheme being my first.

Oddly enough my first was Wagner's Ring Cycle... it ruined me for any broadway show for a while. I got into opera after going through a ShowBoat study phase and heard it sung by opera singers it was stunning to hear the score so fully sung. I started on the Ring Cycle the Met did about 2 years ago and just felt that I was just beginning to get WHY opera has lasted for 400 years. It did help to read a bit on how to listen to and understand the components of opera now I think it's going to be an obsession.

AEA, I used to make freshmen and women in college read the libretto of MADAMA BUTTERFLY. It is of surprising quality, even in translation, and holds its own as drama with the other plays assigned in the class. (Perhaps not surprising, it was based closely on a hit play.)

Only then would I show them a video of the opera. Maybe it helped that they all knew MISS SAIGON, but the method seemed to work very well, even for kids who thought they "hated" opera.

I tried to do the same with SALOME, because it is half as long and also serves to introduce "Symbolism" as a theatrical movement, but not only was the music problematic, the over-the-top action only made them giggle. Too bad, because it's one of my favorites.

I'm a freshman vocal performance major at Indiana University, and this thread makes me very happy. It's good to see new fans of opera and people understanding the thrills that it brings.

I think the big stereotype that opera gets slapped that it needs to get past is that it is a dead, irrelevant art that no one follows. The opposite is true. Opera, while it has its ups and downs, is still an art form that is doing quite well, albeit it is now at an interesting point in its existence, with many people arguing over the best way for the art form to move forward with a lack of Pavarotti esque stars filling the seats of the major opera houses.

But attendance for opera is not bad, and with the recent creation with the Live at the Met HD broadcasts, it is good to see people taking advantage of the opportunity to see these operas. The only thing that worries me about the HD broadcasts is the large group of people that will see those broadcasts instead of live regional operas. But it truly is a great art form if you give it a chance.

Updated On: 1/14/13 at 01:29 AM

Yes it's such a shame that there are no hot men in opera...


I think one needs to look to more modern presentations of opera for this. This fat cow of a guy playing Don Giovanni needs to take a break from the fast food.

I stand corrected because all the singers you listed are singers I love.

But there is a new energy and you can see it in the Met HD broadcasts.

I was hoping someone would mention Teresa Stratas! what I wouldn't give to have a young Teresa Stratas starting all over again in front of our eyes right now...

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While getting lost in a Google image search for Nathan Gunn (the go-to guy to counter the "all opera singers are fat and unattractive" stereotype) I found this nice little blog.

http://barihunks.blogspot.com

I will also add that as well as being insanely talented, Joyce DiDonato is a delight to work with. I worked on a production of La Cenerentola with her some years back in Kansas City and she was a pleasure both on and off stage.

I started attending the opera when someone pointed out that Opera has been consistently popular for 600 years or so- It must have something going for it.

My "first opera" was Turandot at the Lyric. Spectacular.

I find it really pays off to develop the discipline to enjoy Parsifal, but I know there are many who see no point to it at all.

I was at a seminar once in the early 1980s, around the time that Leonard Bernstein was conducting Wagner with the Israel Philharmonic and the Vienna Symphony. He said that the only way to truly listen to Wagner--the only way to truly hear him--was to sit back and "allow the music to wash over you."

I had never done anything like that before--I was a strictly musical-theater person, and listening to me was an active experience: hearing the lyrics, appreciating the rhymes, watching the performance, feeling the subtext. The same went for my appreciation of standards and folk music and pop--even rock music--I was an intent listener, focused equally on the words and music.

I had done something similar to what Bernstein was saying when I would listen to orchestral music, but it was not my "thing." I was always more engaged when there were lyrics.

But what Bernstein was saying was obviously something more intense (everything the man said was intense!) than my sleepy way of listening to symphonies and sonatas. He was urging us to allow Wagner's music in--allow it in to our ears and minds and bodies and souls. He was describing something I didn't want to do: a willing submission, a giving up of control. It felt weird, it felt scary. And then there was the German thing: Bernstein spoke in the same seminar about his love-hate relationship with Wagner and his music and his anti-Semitism and the way the Third Reich had appropriated Wagner's music and left it tainted.

Bernstein's family background Austrian, and he believed that the music of Wagner and other German composers belonged to the Austrian and German people and the rest of the world before it belonged to the Nazis. He was on a personal crusade to restore those composers to the world of music.

It took me a long time to allow Wagner to "wash over me," but I would think of his words whenever I would attend any musical event that is pure music or primarily music. I've now attended all four operas of the Ring Cycle twice. The first time I went thinking, "Well, if I can sit through Nicholas Nickelby or Angels in America, I can make it through the Ring."

The second time, I loved every minute of the 18 hours. I allowed the music to wash over me--and I've discovered that there are ways music can tell stories and evoke emotion--even if it's 4 hours long.

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