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TPO 12 Lecture 3 Music History

Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in a music history class. The professor has been discussing Opera.

Professor
The word opera means work, actually it means works. It’s the plural of the word opus from the
Latin. And in Italian it refers in general to works of art. Opera Lyric or lyric of opera refers to what
we think of as opera, the musical drama. Opera was commonplace in Italy for almost thousands of
years before it became commercial as a venture. And during those years, several things happened

primarily linguistic or thematic and both involving secularization.

Musical drama started in the churches. It was an educational tool. It was used primarily as a
vehicle for teaching religion and was generally presented in the Latin, the language of the Christian
Church which had considerable influence in Italy at that time. But the language of everyday life
was evolving in Europe and at a certain point in the middle ages it was really only merchants,
Socratics aristocrats and clergy who can deal with Latin. The vast majority of the population used
their own regional vernacular in all aspects to their lives. And so in what is now Italy, operas quit
being presented in Latin and started being presented in Italian. And once that happened, the

themes of the opera presentations also started to change. And musical drama moved from the
church to the plaza right outside the church. And the themes again, the themes changed. And
opera was no longer about teaching religion as it was about satire and about expressing the ideas
of society your government without committing yourself to writing and risking imprisonment or
persecution, or what have you.

the dramatic Kevin cadence of language, to the way the rhythm of language was used to express

feeling and used to add drama and of course as a result instead of arias or solos, which would
come to dominated Italian opera. The French relied on that what is the Italian called French Word
1recitativo or French Word 2recitative in English. The lyrics were spoken, frequently to the
accompaniment of a harpsichord.

The French said you really cannot talk about real people who lived in opera and they relied on
mythology to give them their characters and their plots, mythology, the past old traditions, the
novels of chivalry or the epics of chivalry out of the middle Ages. The Italian said, no this is a great
historical tool and what a better way to educate the public about Neo or Attalla Attila or any

number of people than to put them into a play they can see and listen to. The English appropriated
opera after the French. Opera came late to England because all theaters, public theaters were
closed, of course, during their civil war. And it wasn’t until the restoration in 1660 that public
theaters again opened and opera took off. The English made a major adjustment to opera and
exported what they had done to opera back to Italy. So that you have this circle of musical
influences, the Italians invented opera, the French adapted it, the English adopted it, and the
Italians took it back.

It came to America late and was considered to elites for the general public. But Broadway musicals

fulfilled a similar function for a great long while. George ChamponJohn Jay Chapman wrote about
opera, “If an extraterrestrial being or two appear before us and say, what is your society like, what
is this Earth thing all about, you could do worse than take that creature to an opera.” Because
opera does, after all, begin with a man and a woman and any motion.