Top products from r/opera

Get some perspectives from people other than musicians. For example, my best friend is a stagehand for the SF opera and I love hearing her perspective on shows, everything from the technical ramifications of stage design to funny behind the scenes stories.

If you're trying to make opera sound cool, you'll want some segments that address beginners to opera. Like explaining the difference between the different vocal ranges with some audio clips of what happens when someone sings outside their best range. Or guides to improving your experience at your first opera.

The level of instruction in Derycke Cooke's Intro to the Ring Cycle is just right, and the wry, humorous tone of A Night at the Opera makes even the stuffiest opera interesting.

Don't forget to answer questions from your listeners too!

Hey, I'm super new to opera too! I got into it after listening to this lecture series by the Great Courses on Audible: How to Listen to and Understand Opera. They're the most entertaining lectures I've ever heard on anything, and the reason I got interested in opera. It goes over a brief history of opera, all the terminology, gives excerpts of famous operas, and talks about the differences between operas of different time periods and countries. The lecturer Robert Greenberg also has a lecture series on the operas of Verdi, the operas of Wagner, and the operas of Mozart which are also fantastic.

After I listened to How to Listen to and Understand Opera, I bought tickets to every production put on by my local opera theater for the remainder of the year, and over the summer I got a subscription to The Met on Demand. I'm also reading A History of Opera by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. But I wouldn't recommend the book until/unless you've seen quite a few operas. The references to operas I haven't seen are going over my head, but the references to the operas I have seen are so insightful that I know I'm missing out by not knowing some things!

I'd highly recommend the Great Courses lectures, and also just getting out and seeing stuff whenever you can! If seeing something live isn't possible, then you can rent something from or subscribe to the Met Opera on Demand. I liked their production of Carmen from 2010, Verdi's La Traviata, and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

Congrats on your new opera addiction- I mean affinity! Opera is a whirlwind of fun!

A book I highly recommend for beginners is Ticket To The Opera. Mr. Goulding is himself not an expert and he makes that clear up front. But far from disqualifying him, his enthusiasm shines through on every page and that is what makes this 720-page book, despite it's depth and length, lively and informative reading. Another really neat thing about this book is that he's a former journalist who fell in love with opera late in life, so it's almost like your situation (perhaps) and definitely mine, since I also discovered opera late in life. Maybe a better way to say that is that I finally found time to sit through 3-hour Wagnerian works and enjoy them! Another neat thing is that while Goulding does give great summaries of the "greatest hits" you might expect, his extensive dive into the less heard but still outstanding operas, including many 20th century works, make his book far from simplistic.

The only other humorous approach to marketing opera that I've come across so far are a few very brief videos by Des Moines Opera. They aren't giving synopses; they're just very short promos that parody specific opera characters ...

http://www.youtube.com/user/DesMoinesMetroOpera/videos


There is also a blog about attractive baritones, which can be amusing. Search for "BariHunks blog".


There is also a handful of humorous books on opera:.

http://www.amazon.com/Tenors-Tantrums-Trills-Opera-Dictionary/dp/0920151191/ref=sr_1_1

http://www.amazon.com/When-Fat-Lady-Sings-History/dp/0920151345/ref=sr_1_6

http://www.amazon.com/Grabbing-Operas-Their-Tales-Liberating/dp/0920151388/ref=sr_1_16


I greatly admire a book by Hector Berlioz that contains a wealth of humor, entitled "Evenings with the Orchestra".

http://www.amazon.com/Evenings-Orchestra-Hector-Berlioz/dp/0226043746/ref=sr_1_1



That's all I've come across.

Robert Greenberg's How to Listen to and Understand Opera is a good place to start. If you aren't already a subscriber, you can sign up for a free trial with Audible and listen to the audio book for free.

You could also watch the lectures for free via a free trial of Great Courses Plus.

It's not remotely what you're looking for, but a fun introduction to Opera for noobs like me is Forman's A Night at the Opera. It's quite funny and highly educational.

EDIT: The other opera book I have is The Book of 101 Opera Librettos, which I scored for a whopping dollar at a library book sale. I'm really just bragging with that one. :D

1: Sign up to Audible - First book is free so you can / could cancel subscription after that

2: Download Professor Robert Grenberg's [How to Listen to and Understand Opera] (http://www.amazon.com/How-Listen-Understand-Opera/dp/B00DTO6IDC)

3: Enjoy over 24 hours worth of engaging instruction giving a fully comprehensive non-technical nuts and bolts introduction, history and thorough grounding in opera including biographies on key composers, vocal techniques, and all the various types of opera.

Hope this helps - it absolutely worked for me.

My favorite is A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera by Peter Conrad.

Excerpt:

>The characters of opera obey neither moral nor social law. They are women like Isolde with her erotic medicine chest or Carmen with her intoxicating flower, men like the overworked phallic symbol Don Giovanni or Gounod's Faust who, rather than bothering with good works for mankind (to which the hero of Goethe's play commits himself), licks his lips and asks the devil to provide him with pleasures and young mistresses. Music buoys and bears along these clamorous creatures. What rises in and overflows from the orchestra pit is the geyser of their desires: they give voice to the promptings of the underground consciousness.

For books on individual composers:

Mozart's Operas by William Mann

Wagner's Ring and Its Symbols by Robert Donington

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre by Ellen Rosand is an important history about how opera transformed from an intellectual Florentine exercise into a more popular art form.

Thanks. I'm going tomorrow! If your interested in the story, the book on which it's based is really good to. And a film, The Limehouse Golem, also based on that book was just released last week.

Also, fun fact, that's Richard Boldrey in the video, the man who gave us the terrific Guide to Operatic Roles and Arias

(and my former coach from grad school).

This album on amazon has the track list for the mp3 version. That recording is really solid too. It's my favorite. Kleiber and Domingo. Can't go wrong here, IMO.

Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion https://www.amazon.com/dp/0500281947/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_0B5XCbS3Z81EM

This is the best side by side English/German libretto for the Ring I’ve encountered.

> http://www.amazon.com/A-History-Opera-Carolyn-Abbate/dp/0393057216

Much as I like this book, I suspect it might not meet OP's requirement for:

> a book that covers as much of the 20th century as possible

As /u/vornska has said, there are other books which cover the period in much greater detail.

This book is probably the single most helpful reference you can find.

I'd highly recommend Andrew Porter's translation. I read it before I saw my first Ring (Seattle, 1986) and I still have my dogeared old copy and re-read it every time I am lucky enough to a a cycle. I've read other translations, but I always come back to this one.

https://www.amazon.com/Ring-Nibelung-Richard-Wagner/dp/0393008673

I recommend the Barenboim live Bayreuth recording: http://www.amazon.com/Wagner-Der-Ring-Nibelungen-Richard/dp/B004FLKV5O/ref=pd_sim_sbs_m_1

Hogwood or Lang, both are sound, can't really go wrong with either. I liked that they weren't too music-ky if you know what I mean... that reminds me, I have read books about brahms, britten, and sibelius, but not yet Verdi. I should probably do that.

this one?
http://www.amazon.com/Wagner-Der-Ring-Nibelungen-Richard/dp/B004FLKV5O

This is used as a textbook at the music school on upper west side of NYC where I work

He is totally under-rated. Try "Orlando", there's a good recording (with an unfortunately poor countertenor) available. There are more and more Porpora arias showing up in collections of baroque selections by various singers, like Cencic and Jaroussky Interesting factoid: he ended his days as a music teacher in Vienna, where one of his students was... a young Joseph Haydn.

The Carlos Kleiber recording with Cotrubas, Domingo and Milnes is quite famous, though Traviata for me must always be Maria Callas. I'll take the grainy quality, just because she is the only one that can make that character not seem super whiny to me. I know I'm blashpheming, but it's how I feel.

Recommended reading for this thread:

• Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
  
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff