Opera Trivia
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100 free Opera trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This opera trivia quiz covers four centuries of the art form, from a lost Florentine experiment in 1598 to minimalist operas about Einstein and Richard Nixon. The easier questions cover the names everyone half-knows: Carmen, The Magic Flute, Nessun dorma, the Three Tenors, La Scala, the Sydney Opera House and the Bugs Bunny cartoon that taught a generation to sing 'Kill the wabbit'. The harder end is for people who own more than one recording of Tosca: the world's first public opera house, the castrato who sang to a depressed Spanish king every night for nine years, the overture Rossini recycled from two earlier operas, the opera Puccini left unfinished, the newspaper critic who called Tosca a 'shabby little shocker', Callas's rivalries, Pavarotti's nine high Cs at the Met, Wagner's 15-hour Ring cycle and the theatre he built to stage it. There are also questions on the vocabulary of libretto, recitative, bel canto and verismo, and on the singers, from Farinelli and Jenny Lind to Caruso and Joan Sutherland, who made the form famous. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the operas, composers, singers and houses involved before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our classical music, musicals and The Phantom of the Opera quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Italian word 'opera' shares a Latin root with 'operate' and literally means what?
A work
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.
Q 02Which Renaissance city staged Jacopo Peri's Dafne, generally considered the first opera, around 1598?
Florence
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.
Q 03Which Monteverdi opera of 1607, about a musician who braves the underworld for his bride, is the earliest still regularly performed?
L'Orfeo
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.
Q 04In 1637 a wealthy merchant family opened the world's first public opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, in which city?
Venice
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.
Q 05What is the text of an opera called?
Libretto
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.
Q 06Which term describes the florid early-19th-century style of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti?
Bel canto
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.
Q 07Which Leoncavallo opera about a jealous clown usually shares a double bill with Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana?
Pagliacci
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.
Q 08A Singspiel is a German form of opera that includes what?
Spoken dialogue
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.
Q 09In Handel's day, the hero of a serious Italian opera usually sang in a high voice written for which kind of singer?
Castrato
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.
Q 10Which singing superstar left London's opera stage in 1737 to sing nightly for Spain's melancholy King Philip V?
Farinelli
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.
Q 11Whose 1760s 'reform' operas, starting with Orfeo ed Euridice, reacted against opera seria?
Gluck
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.
Q 12Which poet wrote the words for Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte?
Lorenzo Da Ponte
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.
Q 13Which city, wild about Mozart's Figaro, commissioned and premiered his 1787 opera about a punished rake?
Prague
Q 21Verdi's last two operas, Otello and Falstaff, are both based on the works of which writer?
Shakespeare
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.
Q 22What did Wagner call his ideal of fusing music, poetry, drama and stagecraft into a single whole?
Gesamtkunstwerk
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.
Q 23Wagner's four-opera Ring cycle opens with a dwarf stealing gold from which river?
Rhine
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.
Q 14Which Mozart opera opened at a suburban theatre just two months before the composer's death?
The Magic Flute
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.
Q 15Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro is based on a comedy by which French playwright?
Beaumarchais
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.
Q 16Which Rossini comic opera's famous overture was recycled from two of his earlier operas?
The Barber of Seville
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.
Q 17The finale of which Rossini overture became the theme of The Lone Ranger?
William Tell
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.
Q 18'Va, pensiero', the chorus of homesick Hebrew slaves, comes from which early Verdi opera?
Nabucco
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.
Q 19Rigoletto, based on a Victor Hugo play, premiered in 1851 at which Venetian theatre?
La Fenice
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.
Q 20Verdi's Aida had its premiere in 1871 in which city?
Cairo
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.
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.
Q 24Wagner built his own festival theatre, dedicated to his works, in which German town?
Bayreuth
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.
Q 25Bizet's Carmen scandalised its first audiences in 1875 at which Paris home of light, moral pieces?
Opéra-Comique
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.
Q 26In Carmen, Don José loses the heroine to Escamillo, who has what profession?
Bullfighter
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.
Q 27Which conductor, aged just 28, led the 1896 Turin premiere of Puccini's La bohème?
Arturo Toscanini
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.
Q 28Which Puccini opera of torture and murder did Joseph Kerman call a 'shabby little shocker'?
Tosca
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.
Q 29Madama Butterfly's original two-act version was a fiasco at its 1904 premiere at which house?
La Scala
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.
Q 30Puccini died in 1924 leaving which opera unfinished?
Turandot
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.