When going to an opera, there are a multitude of people involved in making what you experience.  Here is an incomplete list of the people who will be involved in this.

For ease of writing I will refer to people that can be either female or male in the masculine

Conductor: This is the guy standing down in front of everyone with his back to the audience. He waves his arms around a lot. Basically, he is the one in charge of keeping everyone together.  Keeping everyone literally in the same place on the same page.  He also makes big musical decisions and shapes musical ideas (like how fast a section will be or how loud it will be).  Singers and orchestral members watch him a lot, he does really interesting stuff.

Orchestra: The people playing the instruments. Depending on which composer they are playing it can range the gamut: from amazingly virtuosic playing to an umm-pah-pah or um-pah-um-pah.  Usually the story is told as much through these musicians as the people on stage.

Director: You won’t see him till the curtain call (if he stuck around for the show to open) they are in charge of making what you see happen onstage.  Their ability/importance can go form being a traffic cop (i.e. you go here-leave there) to making big dramatic decisions about what the whole show is REALLY about.

Principles: These are the people on stage with names and play vital parts in the onstage drama of the opera a.k.a. singers

Comprimario: other people on stage with names, often with more general names like “the doctor, “the armored man” they generally don’t sing as much as the principles, but are vital for moving the story along.  From the italian meaning “with the principal” In many operas they provide comic relief

Chorus: these are the other singers on stage. They often play the role of the masses, the crowds, townspeople, slaves, etc etc etc. Who have something to say about what is going on with the principles.

Supers: short for supernumeraries, they are on stage but they don’t sing but they do make the crowds armies and such look bigger, sometimes they will have important acting roles that don’t require talking or singing.

Dancers: well they are the dances, for the ballet. In many operas there are ballets, so these people are vital for that. A lot of operatic music is based on dance

Stage Manager and Crew: These are the people behind the stage you don’t see, they are immensely powerful people when it comes to the actual performance.  It is up to them to create, change and maintain the worlds in which the opera takes place. So we treat them nice and with great respect.

feel free to skip down to part one if you don’t want to read about where I got the idea

A few weeks ago over dinner I was discussing my upcoming opera with some friends and my friend Tommy turned to me and said, Dan I have no idea what you are talking about. Tommy is a brilliant architect, educated and cultured in many areas of which I have limited knowledge. This sparked a discussion about our gaps of knowledge. Things that we should, as members of society, cultured individuals, and people of discriminating taste should all know about, but don’t. From this idea the primers were born.

This is my primer for Opera. Consider it a beta version. All thoughts and ideas and takes on it are from my point of view. The goal of this is to give you enough information that you will be able to have an opinion, even if that opinion happens to mine. I am attempting to answer big basic questions about what it is and what you need to know. Hopefully after reading through the primer a few times you can enter into a talk during an intermission and be able to mingle with the conosceti of the art.

Part 1

Q: What is this ‘Opera’ anyway?
A: In Ambrose Bierce’s A Devil’s Dictionary he defined it thus

Opera
n. A play representing life in another world, whose inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures and no postures but attitudes. All acting is simulation, and the word simulation is from simia, an ape; but in opera the actor takes for his model Simia audibilis (or Pithecanthropos stentor) — the ape that howls.
The actor apes a man — at least in shape;
The opera performer apes and ape.

In a more serious manner, opera is a dramatic art form combining stage action (drama) music and words in an endeavor to tell a story and create something more than the sum of its parts.

Q: Isn’t that musical theater?
A: Yes that could also be a good definition for musical theater.  The line between what is an opera and what is a musical is often fuzzy.  Traditionally the difference was that musicals had more spoken text with music interspersed throughout, and opera had much more focus on the music to tell the drama.

There is no clear cut rule as to what the difference is today.  In new operas/musicals it is what the creative team (composer and writer) decide to call it.  So if they call it an opera, it is an opera, if they call it a musical it is a musical.  There are stylistic differences between the two which I could go on about ad nauseam but the quickest way to tell the difference, is that an opera usually doesn’t have any microphones and in musical theater everyone will have a body mic.  Although this isn’t even a hard and fast rule anymore, in the recently debuted Doctor Atomic (an opera) the composer wrote for amplified singers.

coming soon Part 2, the Major Players

Step 1:

You will need your score, a watch/clock, and maybe a piano. Get them all together.

Step 2:
Open the music to where ever you want to start to work, count out 5 measures.

Step 3:
Now look at your clock and set the alarm for 5 minutes.

Step 4:
You now take the next 5 mintes and study those 5 measures.

Play them through, sing them, when you get bored with that imagine what you want them to sound like, ask yourself: what is going on? what do these words mean? who are you talking to? how do I want this to sound? observe everything you can about the music: the dynamics, the harmonic progression, what does that sound like? why did the composer choose that particular sound to go with that melody? look at the rhythm of the other parts, do they accompany you? or do they do something else? how does that change the way you think about your part? why did he use so many dotted rhythms? why so many triplets? what about the words? do you mean them? does the harmony, rhythm, melody, range, key, tempo change your take on the words?  etc etc etc
as you can see these questions can go on and on, and they should, this is intended as a jumping off point. the key is to keep asking them, observing, and experimenting for the full 5 minutes.

Step 5:
When the 5 minutes are up count out the next 5 measures and repeat steps 2-4.

At the performances, Bryce and Rebecca got up to tell of how this company all started.  Singers searching for that place inbetween working in “real” opera houses (or working there sporadically) and being overqualified to still be considered a student.  They saw the trying-to-be-opera world with a glut of places where you could pay to sing, to try it out, where sometimes musical and dramatic standards were… erratic.  They wanted to fill that gap with someplace where people could try it, without shelling out thousands of dollars and with high standards. They saw a need and they filled it. They told you it was all about the singers, helping them. Giving them the chance to learn these roles and perform them, get them on the resume. As much as I admire them, I think they were wrong, or at least only half right. It was all about the music.

The conductor was Carmine Aufiero, a man who practically sweats olive oil because his approach to the music was so F@#$ing italian.  He sang along every note in the orchestra, his brown knit with deep concentration as he brought the score to life.  At the piano, Wilson Southerland, whose gentle southern demeanor belied the passion and virtuosity with which he commanded the piano…. I can go on and on about the singers, but that isn’t why I am writing this.

This company is a gem in the rough.  It is not there for the singers, for the musicians, as much as it is for the music. Every person that I made music with at these concerts had spent hundreds of hours on the music, thousands of hours practicing and poured there heart and soul into it.

The company exists for the sole purpose of making music. Specifically of making opera. More so, by making it with people who haven’t had chance to make it, or atleast not with this opera.  When you think about it, it is an absurd idea, putting time effort and money into something like this, right? Where can the pay off be?  We are in the middle of the great recession right? Yet here we are, a bunch of singers, a conductor and pianist all in a room trying to take notes on a page and bring them to life. Not to life as they had been made before, but fresh and new. Experiencing opera, the creation of it is an amazingly addictive experience.

This is not a time to be conservative, all the big opera houses need to be conservative now to make it through, it is a time for working in the red, not the black, and a time for bold moves like Opera Manhattan.