100 Fun Facts About Opera

The Italian word 'opera' shares a Latin root with 'operate' and literally means what?

A work is all it means: Latin opera, 'work, effort', doubles as the plural of opus. So a composer's Opus 1 and a night at the opera are, at root, the same word.

Which Renaissance city staged Jacopo Peri's Dafne, generally considered the first opera, around 1598?

Florence is where a circle of humanists trying to revive Greek drama staged it at a nobleman's palace for Carnival. Most of the music is now lost, so the first opera survives mainly as printed words.

Which Monteverdi opera of 1607, about a musician who braves the underworld for his bride, is the earliest still regularly performed?

L'Orfeo was written for the Gonzaga court at Mantua. Peri's Euridice of 1600 is older, survives and served as its model, yet L'Orfeo is the one still regularly staged.

In 1637 a wealthy merchant family opened the world's first public opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, in which city?

Venice made opera a business: the Tron family's theatre was the first to sell a ticket to anyone who could pay. Until then opera had been a private spectacle for courts and the aristocracy.

What is the text of an opera called?

Libretto is Italian for 'little book': early audiences bought the printed words to follow the drama. Most composers set someone else's text, though Wagner was unusual in writing his own.

Which term describes the florid early-19th-century style of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti?

Bel canto, 'beautiful singing', prized agility and exact control of tone. It fell from fashion as opera turned to heavier, more dramatic voices, until 20th-century revivals brought it back.

Which Leoncavallo opera about a jealous clown usually shares a double bill with Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana?

Pagliacci runs only about an hour, so houses pair it with Mascagni's equally short shocker as 'Cav and Pag'. Leoncavallo said the plot came from a real murder case his father, a judge, had handled.

A Singspiel is a German form of opera that includes what?

Spoken dialogue is the mark of a Singspiel, literally a 'sing-play'. German versions of English ballad operas fed its 18th-century rise, and Mozart raised it to high art in The Abduction from the Seraglio.

In Handel's day, the hero of a serious Italian opera usually sang in a high voice written for which kind of singer?

Castrato singers, cut before puberty so the voice never broke, were the rage of 18th-century audiences and took most male leads. With none left, countertenors now often sing their roles.

Which singing superstar left London's opera stage in 1737 to sing nightly for Spain's melancholy King Philip V?

Farinelli was summoned by Queen Elisabeth Farnese, who hoped his voice would cure her husband's depression. He sang for the king nightly for nearly a decade, then stayed on as a favourite of the next king.

Whose 1760s 'reform' operas, starting with Orfeo ed Euridice, reacted against opera seria?

Gluck wanted a 'beautiful simplicity': music that served the poetry, stripped of the 'useless and superfluous ornaments' star singers loved. Mozart was among the composers his ideals shaped.

Which poet wrote the words for Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte?

Lorenzo Da Ponte was a priest banished from his homeland over an adulterous affair before he met Mozart. He later fled his creditors to America, where he taught Italian at Columbia.

Which city, wild about Mozart's Figaro, commissioned and premiered his 1787 opera about a punished rake?

Prague had made such a hit of The Marriage of Figaro that its theatre's impresario ordered a new opera, and the premiere was a triumph. Vienna heard it only the following May, in a version Mozart revised.

Which Mozart opera opened at a suburban theatre just two months before the composer's death?

The Magic Flute opened on 30 September 1791 with the man who wrote its words, theatre manager Emanuel Schikaneder, playing the bird-catcher Papageno himself. Mozart conducted the premiere and died on 5 December.

Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro is based on a comedy by which French playwright?

Beaumarchais wrote three Figaro plays, and his own life outdid them: a watchmaker's son turned royal secret agent, he bought arms for the American revolutionaries.

Which Rossini comic opera's famous overture was recycled from two of his earlier operas?

The Barber of Seville's overture first opened Aureliano in Palmira, a serious opera about a Roman emperor, then one about Elizabeth I of England. So the comedy's curtain-raiser shares no tunes with the comedy.

The finale of which Rossini overture became the theme of The Lone Ranger?

William Tell of 1829 was the last of Rossini's 39 operas. Rich and famous at 37, he simply stopped, and wrote no more operas in the nearly 40 years he had left.

'Va, pensiero', the chorus of homesick Hebrew slaves, comes from which early Verdi opera?

Nabucco, about the Bible's Nebuchadnezzar, was Verdi's first great hit. Its exiles' lament for a lost homeland later took on the status of an unofficial Italian national anthem.

Rigoletto, based on a Victor Hugo play, premiered in 1851 at which Venetian theatre?

La Fenice nearly lost it: Austrian censors balked at Hugo's lecherous king, so Verdi made him a duke and moved the story to Italy. The working title had been La maledizione, The Curse.

Verdi's Aida had its premiere in 1871 in which city?

Cairo had a new opera house, and Egypt's khedive commissioned Aida for it. Verdi had earlier turned down a request for a hymn to mark the opening of the Suez Canal.

Verdi's last two operas, Otello and Falstaff, are both based on the works of which writer?

Shakespeare lured Verdi out of retirement twice. Falstaff, premiered when he was 79, was only his second comedy, and its success avenged the failure of his first half a century earlier.

What did Wagner call his ideal of fusing music, poetry, drama and stagecraft into a single whole?

Gesamtkunstwerk means 'total work of art'. Wagner set out the ideal in essays of 1849 and lived it, writing his own words as well as the music and dictating the scenery, staging and acting.

Wagner's four-opera Ring cycle opens with a dwarf stealing gold from which river?

The Rhine's gold is guarded by three Rhinemaidens until the dwarf Alberich curses love, seizes it and forges a ring of power. The full cycle takes about 15 hours over four evenings.

Wagner built his own festival theatre, dedicated to his works, in which German town?

Bayreuth's theatre opened in 1876 with the first complete Ring. After Wagner died his widow Cosima took over the festival, and it stayed in his family's hands for generations.

Bizet's Carmen scandalised its first audiences in 1875 at which Paris home of light, moral pieces?

The Opéra-Comique's public expected virtue rewarded, so a heroine who smokes, brawls and is murdered on stage was condemned as immoral. Bizet died after the 33rd performance, unaware it would conquer the world.

In Carmen, Don José loses the heroine to Escamillo, who has what profession?

Bullfighter Escamillo swaggers in with the Toreador Song in act 2. In the final scene the crowd cheers his triumph inside the arena while, outside its walls, the jilted Don José kills Carmen.

Which conductor, aged just 28, led the 1896 Turin premiere of Puccini's La bohème?

Arturo Toscanini had started out as a cellist. At 19, on tour in Rio de Janeiro, he left his seat in the orchestra to replace a booed conductor and led the whole of Aida from memory.

Which Puccini opera of torture and murder did Joseph Kerman call a 'shabby little shocker'?

Tosca drew the jibe in Kerman's 1956 book Opera as Drama. Audiences disagreed from the start: the 1900 Rome premiere went ahead despite bomb threats and was an immediate success.

Madama Butterfly's original two-act version was a fiasco at its 1904 premiere at which house?

La Scala's first-night audience jeered and hissed throughout, and Puccini withdrew the opera after that single performance. He split its overlong second act in two, and the new version triumphed in Brescia three months later.

Puccini died in 1924 leaving which opera unfinished?

Turandot was finished by Franco Alfano from Puccini's sketches. At the 1926 premiere the conductor stopped mid-act at the last music Puccini wrote, and told the audience that here the opera ended.

'Nessun dorma' is sung by which character?

Calaf, the unknown prince, has solved the princess's three riddles, then offers her a way out: learn his name by dawn and he will die. She decrees that no one in Peking may sleep until it is found, hence 'Let no one sleep'.

Pavarotti's 'Nessun dorma' became a worldwide hit after it was used for which event in 1990?

The FIFA World Cup in Italy turned a Puccini aria into a pop hit. His last performance of it, at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, was secretly mimed to a recording made days before, his conductor later revealed.

The first Three Tenors concert was held at which ancient Roman site, the Rome Opera's summer stage?

Baths of Caracalla: the emperor's third-century bathhouse stages open-air opera each summer. José Carreras, just recovered from leukemia, gave his fee to research into the disease, and the recording became the best-selling classical album.

Pavarotti's 1972 Met breakthrough came in a Donizetti aria notorious for its string of which note?

High C it was: 'Ah! mes amis' from La fille du régiment calls for a whole string of them, a famously demanding run. His ease with it earned him the nickname 'King of the High Cs'.

Maria Callas, born to Greek immigrants, grew up in which city before moving to Athens?

New York: she was born in Manhattan in 1923. When her parents' marriage failed in 1937, her mother took both daughters to Athens, where Maria trained at the conservatory and sang her first lead role in the occupied city.

Callas's love affair with which Greek shipping tycoon dominated the gossip pages?

Aristotle Onassis's wife divorced him over the affair, and Callas left her own husband for him, yet he never married her. In 1968 he wed Jacqueline Kennedy instead.

Australian soprano Joan Sutherland was known by which Italian nickname?

La Stupenda, 'the stupendous one', first pictured herself as a heavyweight Wagner singer. Her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge, was convinced her future lay in florid, high-flying roles, and he was right.

Which Neapolitan tenor became one of the first great stars of recorded sound in the early 1900s?

Enrico Caruso never forgave his home city: coolly received there in 1901, he vowed never to sing in Naples again, and kept his word. Yet it was in Naples that he died, in 1921.

Jenny Lind, the 'Swedish Nightingale', toured America in 1850 at the invitation of which showman?

P. T. Barnum, by his own account unmusical, had never heard her sing when he signed her. She was almost unknown in America, so his publicity campaign made her a celebrity before her ship even docked.

The season at Milan's great opera house traditionally opens on 7 December, the feast of which saint, the city's patron?

Ambrose was Milan's Roman governor, still unbaptised, when a crowd acclaimed him bishop in 374. He was baptised and consecrated within about a week, and became the city's patron saint.

The Metropolitan Opera opened in 1883 with which French opera, starring Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson?

Faust was sung in Italian that night, French opera or not: the young company at first performed everything in Italian. It then switched to doing everything in German, even Verdi.

The Met's first national radio broadcast, on Christmas Day 1931, was of which opera?

Hansel and Gretel belonged to Christmas from the start: it was first staged two days before Christmas 1893, with Richard Strauss conducting. Humperdinck's sister wrote the words, from the Grimm fairy tale.

The Palais Garnier in Paris was begun in 1861 at the behest of which ruler?

Napoleon III ordered it as part of Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris, and an unknown 35-year-old, Charles Garnier, won the design contest. The emperor never saw it open: deposed in 1870, he died in exile two years before it was finished.

The Vienna State Opera opened in 1869 with which Mozart opera, in which a murdered man's statue comes to supper?

Don Giovanni opened the house on 25 May 1869 in front of Emperor Franz Joseph. Neither of its two architects lived to see the night: one took his own life, and his partner died soon after.

The Sydney Opera House was designed by an architect from which country?

Denmark's Jørn Utzon won the 1957 design competition, then quit in 1966 amid rows with the state government and left the country. He never went back, and died in 2008 without once seeing his finished masterpiece.

Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, which he called a 'folk opera', is set in the slums of which city?

Charleston's Catfish Row is home to the disabled beggar Porgy. To absorb the setting, the Brooklyn-born Gershwin spent the summer of 1934 on an island near the city with DuBose Heyward, whose novel began it all.

Which Britten opera of 1945 follows a Suffolk fisherman hounded by his village after his apprentice dies at sea?

Peter Grimes comes from George Crabbe's 1810 poem The Borough. Britten, homesick in California in 1941, read a magazine article about the Suffolk poet, and it sent him back to England to write the opera.

What may the audience do during Philip Glass's five-hour, intermission-free Einstein on the Beach?

Enter and leave as they wish: the 1976 piece has no story to lose track of. Its singers mostly count out numbers and chant do-re-mi syllables.

Which American composer's first opera, Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987?

John Adams took the idea from director Peter Sellars. One leading critic opened his review of the premiere with 'That was it?', yet the opera outlived the verdict and reached the Met in 2011.

The 1957 cartoon What's Opera, Doc? has Elmer Fudd singing 'Kill the wabbit' to the tune of what?

Ride of the Valkyries comes from Wagner's Ring cycle, and Chuck Jones's short squeezes that four-evening epic into six minutes. It was picked for the National Film Registry in 1992.

The Amazon Theatre, an opera house in the heart of Brazil's rainforest, was paid for by a boom in what?

Rubber made the city of Manaus rich enough to crown its opera house with a dome of 36,000 tiles in the colours of Brazil's flag.

Opera pioneer Jean-Baptiste Lully died of gangrene after striking which part of his body with a conducting staff?

His foot took the blow while he directed his own Te Deum, a piece performed to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from surgery.

Which 1996 rock musical moves the story of Puccini's La bohème from Paris to Manhattan's East Village?

Rent replaces the tuberculosis of the original with HIV/AIDS. Its creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly just before the first preview.

Which showpiece comes from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, where an enchanted swan transforms the hero?

Flight of the Bumblebee plays as young Gvidon becomes an insect, so that he can fly off unseen to visit his father, the tsar.

The opera term 'diva', the feminine of the Latin 'divus', literally means what?

Goddess was the compliment: the title arose in the early 19th century, when star sopranos seemed almost divine to their adoring public.

The 2005 opera Doctor Atomic follows which physicist through the tense hours before the first atomic bomb test?

Oppenheimer closes the first act singing a sonnet by the poet Donne, and much of the libretto is drawn from declassified government documents.

In Rossini's Cinderella opera La Cenerentola, the prince traces the heroine by which item instead of a glass slipper?

A bracelet does the job: she hands the prince one of a matching pair and tells him to find her. Rossini finished the whole score in about three weeks.

In the film Pretty Woman, Edward flies Vivian by private jet to San Francisco to see which Verdi opera?

La traviata mirrors the film's own story: its heroine is a Paris courtesan who falls for a young man from a respectable family.

At the start of Bizet's opera, Carmen and her quarrelsome workmates pour out of what kind of workplace?

A tobacco factory employs her rolling cigarettes, and she is seized by the guards after attacking another woman there with a knife.

Puccini's Madama Butterfly waits three years for her American husband in a house overlooking which Japanese port?

Nagasaki is where the US naval officer Pinkerton marries and then abandons her, and the city has put up a memorial to Puccini.

Which composer of nine symphonies finished just one opera, Fidelio, about a wife who rescues her husband from prison?

Beethoven struggled so much with Fidelio that he wrote four different overtures for it before he was satisfied.

Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, both drawn from Pushkin, are operas by which Russian composer?

Tchaikovsky kept much of Pushkin's own verse in Eugene Onegin and preferred to call the piece 'lyrical scenes'.

Richard Strauss's scandalous opera Salome, with its Dance of the Seven Veils, is based on a play by which Irish writer?

Oscar Wilde wrote the play in French. The opera so alarmed the Met's wealthy patrons in 1907 that every performance after the first was cancelled.

The Bridal Chorus heard at countless weddings comes from which Wagner opera about a mysterious swan knight?

Lohengrin's chorus follows the wedding instead of opening it: it ushers the bride Elsa into the bridal chamber, where she asks the one question she swore never to ask.

Wagner's Ring cycle ends as which heroine spurs her horse into the funeral pyre of her beloved Siegfried?

Brünnhilde and her horse Grane vanish into the fire as Valhalla itself goes up in flames, ending a cycle that runs to about 15 hours over four evenings.

The Anvil Chorus, sung at dawn by Spanish gypsies striking their hammers, comes from which Verdi opera?

Il trovatore's hit tune once got a giant outing: at an 1869 Boston festival, thousands performed it while a corps of firemen pounded anvils.

Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, whose heroine goes mad and kills her bridegroom, is set in which country?

Scotland's Lammermuir Hills give the opera its name, by way of the novel The Bride of Lammermoor, in which the heroine is caught in a feud between two families.

London's Royal Opera House, where Handel premiered many works, is usually known by the name of which district?

Covent Garden's present theatre is the third on the site, after disastrous fires in 1808 and 1856 destroyed its predecessors.

Which Italian city has staged a summer opera festival inside its ancient Roman amphitheatre since 1913?

Verona's arena is among the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres anywhere, and only wartime has interrupted its opera seasons.

Which Spanish tenor's recovery from leukaemia was marked by the first Three Tenors concert, with Pavarotti and Domingo?

José Carreras had been given a 1-in-10 chance of survival, and the concert raised money for the leukaemia foundation he set up afterwards.

Which contralto, famed for her 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert, became the first Black American to sing at the Met?

Marian Anderson gave that open-air concert after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing to an integrated audience in their hall.

Which New Zealand soprano sang to a worldwide television audience at the 1981 wedding of Charles and Diana?

Kiri Te Kanawa sang a Handel aria at the ceremony. She had been adopted as a baby by Thomas Te Kanawa, who ran a trucking business, and his wife Nell.

Which 'Fairy Tale King' of Bavaria summoned Wagner to court and funded the composer's later operas?

Ludwig II had been spellbound by one of the operas at 15, and later covered the walls of his castle Neuschwanstein with scenes from the legends behind them.

Which Soviet leader's visit to Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was followed by a damning Pravda editorial?

Joseph Stalin saw it in Moscow in January 1936; days later the unsigned article 'Muddle Instead of Music' damned it as coarse and confused.

Which 'King of Ragtime' composed the opera Treemonisha, which was fully staged only decades after his death?

Scott Joplin paid for its only hearing in his lifetime, a 1915 read-through with himself at the piano; a posthumous Pulitzer Prize followed in 1976.

Which English opera festival, held at a Sussex country house since 1934, is known for its long picnic interval?

Glyndebourne is still overseen by the Christie family: John Christie built the theatre onto his own house with his wife, the soprano Audrey Mildmay.

Which French chef created the dessert Peach Melba in honour of the Australian soprano Nellie Melba?

Auguste Escoffier first served it at London's Savoy Hotel on an ice sculpture of a swan, a nod to the opera she was starring in.

Which style of operatic singing copies the rhythms of ordinary speech, often over just a harpsichord and cello?

Recitative with such sparse backing is called 'secco', or dry, and it lets the singer take a freer, almost improvised approach to rhythm.

The title role of Verdi's Rigoletto, a hunchbacked court jester, is written for which male voice type?

Baritone Felice Varesi created the part in 1851, while the tenor role went to the jester's employer, the womanising Duke of Mantua.

Which Italian term describes fast, heavily ornamented singing full of runs and trills, a soprano speciality?

Coloratura comes from an Italian word for colouring, though it refers to the notes added and not to any change in the tone of the voice.

Which Italian term for an opera company's leading female singer also describes anyone demanding and temperamental?

Prima donna literally means 'first lady', and the very greatest were styled 'prima donna assoluta', the absolute first lady.

In many opera houses, who sits in a cramped box at the front edge of the stage, feeding singers their opening words?

The prompter gives the first words of each phrase a few seconds early, mouthed or half-sung so that only those on stage can hear.

Which German term names a short recurring musical phrase tied to a character, place or idea, as in Wagner's operas?

Leitmotif is a word Wagner never applied to his own work, and he did not invent the device, though his Ring cycle made it famous.

Which word for the translated text projected above an opera stage is a trademark of the Canadian Opera Company?

Surtitles got their first live outing at the company's January 1983 staging of Elektra, after being tried out on broadcast operas in the late 1970s.

Members of the 'claque' at 19th-century Paris opera houses were hired to do what during performances?

Paid to applaud on cue, the claqueurs took their signal from a leader, while specialists called rieurs laughed loudly at the jokes.

Cherubino in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, a teenage boy sung by a woman, is an example of which type of part?

Breeches role parts are also called trouser or pants roles, and Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier is another of the most often performed.

Which Spanish form of opera did Plácido Domingo grow up performing in his parents' company in Mexico?

Zarzuela may take its name from a royal hunting lodge near Madrid, where the form is said to have been first staged for the court.

In the opera The Tales of Hoffmann, the poet's first love, Olympia, turns out to be what?

A mechanical doll built by a scientist, she passes for a real woman only because Hoffmann has been sold a pair of enchanted spectacles.

The tune famous worldwide as the can-can began as the 'Galop infernal' in an 1858 comic opera by which composer?

Jacques Offenbach wrote it for the wild closing scene of a spoof on Greek myth; Paris cabarets such as the Moulin Rouge adopted it decades later.

In Stockhausen's opera cycle Licht, each member of a string quartet performs from inside what kind of vehicle?

A helicopter each, in fact: the idea came to Stockhausen in a dream, and a Dutch air force display team flew the 1995 premiere.

Which Russian composer of the opera Prince Igor made his living as a professor of chemistry?

Alexander Borodin trained as a doctor, took up his chair in St Petersburg in 1862 and made early contributions to organic chemistry.

Riots that followed an 1830 performance of Auber's opera La muette de Portici grew into which country's revolution?

Belgium's break from Dutch rule began that August night in Brussels, when theatregoers fresh from the patriotic opera joined the crowds outside.

Which Swedish king, shot at a masked ball in 1792, inspired Verdi's opera Un ballo in maschera?

Gustav III had the Royal Swedish Opera built during his reign, and he lived for thirteen days after the gunshot before dying of his wounds.

The 1859 rallying cry 'Viva VERDI' used the composer's name as an acronym hailing which future king of Italy?

Victor Emmanuel II, then king of Sardinia, was hidden in the letters: Vittorio Emanuele, Re d'Italia. The code began in Naples and spread.

Puccini's comic opera Gianni Schicchi takes its swindling hero from a few lines by which medieval Italian poet?

Dante glimpses the real Schicchi in hell, damned for impersonating a dead man to dictate a will in his own favour, the trick the opera plays for laughs.

The title heroine of Bellini's opera Norma, who loves a Roman proconsul, is the high priestess of which order?

The Druids of Roman-occupied Gaul are led by her father Oroveso, who is stirring up a revolt against the very occupiers she has fallen for.

In the opening aria of Handel's opera Serse, known as his 'Largo', the Persian king sings in praise of what?

A plane tree is all Xerxes is admiring, grateful for its shade; the tune became so popular on its own that it is simply called Handel's Largo.

Which Austrian city, the birthplace of Mozart, has hosted a renowned summer festival of opera and drama since 1920?

Salzburg's festival puts Mozart's operas at its heart, yet one of its fixtures is a play, Hofmannsthal's Jedermann, staged every year.

Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha, sung entirely in Sanskrit, is loosely based on the life of which leader?

Mahatma Gandhi coined the title, his term for nonviolent resistance, and the sung words are taken from the Bhagavad Gita.

In Donizetti's comic opera The Elixir of Love, the 'love potion' sold by the quack Dulcamara is really what?

Cheap red wine is all the lovesick Nemorino gets for his last coins, having asked for the potion from the legend of Tristan and Isolde.