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Explaining opera

October 9, 2026
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It’s hard not to make fun of opera.

The 300-pound soprano stands onstage and sings of her love for the 110-pound tenor while proving that nothing can sustain a louder note longer outside of an air-raid siren.

In this art form, when someone is fatally stabbed it can take him 20 minutes to fall over, because he has his big aria to sing. The audience applauds; he expires.

Bugs Bunny, after all, doesn’t spend much time lampooning novelists or painters. No, he saves his best digs for the opera. There is much to laugh at. Opera is a highly artificial artform, with so many traditions and habits. 

But it is one that many people love deeply. Some would rather give up food. And that is because opera goes straight to the heart, even as it gives the brain conniptions. It is all about emotions. 

We make a mistake when we think that opera is just drama with singing. Unlike most theater, opera isn’t really about the story or about characters caught in a plot. One reason some people feel estranged from opera is that they expect a naturalistic story and they get what seems to them a truckload of silliness. Lots of overwrought screaming about murder, incest, adultery and death.

But opera isn’t about the characters or the story, at least not in the way that The Odd Couple is about Oscar and Felix, or Streetcar Named Desire is about Blanche and Stanley.

No, opera is about raw emotion personified onstage, and the music characterizes those emotions much more successfully than the singers who act out the parts. This is opera’s great power.

There is a wonderful scene from Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, where his character’s hostility has escaped and terrorizes Central Park, pursued by police and tracker dogs. Like some sort of shaggy Bigfoot, it wanders through the scene killing and maiming; it is a monster on the loose.

Now imagine that instead of his hostility, it is the character’s passion, or his jealousy or ambition, that has escaped. Put that passion onstage in a costume and let it sing its heart out: That’s opera.

The music is a direct conduit to the heart. Mere words only get in the way. Music can convey emotions beyond words. Libretti can sometimes be banal, but the music underneath is very deep and powerful.

Opera, like all the high arts, recognizes that inside each of us, these large things exist, and not only do they exist, but they are the most real parts of us.

Yes, we drive to work each day. Yes, we give the spouse a peck on the cheek when we leave. Yes, we look forward to the ballgame over the weekend.

But even the dullest accountant or shoe salesman has in his or her past or future the great love, the deaths of dear ones, the lost love, the fear for children’s ruin, the sense of growing older and facing the imminence of death, the sense of sharing the good marriage, or of the isolation of a bad one: These emotional states are so much larger than our 9-to-5 jobs, so much more real. They are our true selves, though we orphan them through habit.

Opera reacquaints us with that true self. It reminds us that as humans, we are more than our next promotion, more than our membership in the Kiwanis Club. That is opera’s job; that is its glory.

That is your experience of erotic passion up there singing to Don Jose in Carmen. That is your heroic inner self killing the dragon in Siegfried. With opera, you are asked to recognize yourself.

Listening to opera, you fall into a trancelike state and all the boring parts of life drop away, and you experience only the marrow of it all: The things that, when you come to your deathbed, you regret not having had more time for.

 PART 2: A SAMPLING

Here are a dozen operas, over the centuries of the form, that all capture the essence of what opera offers. These are all in the repertoire of most opera companies, and those that you cannot see live, are all available of DVD or on streaming services. 

The oldest opera that still gets regular performances, Claudio Monteverdi’s La Favola d’Orfeo was performed at the Mantua court in 1607 and tells the story of Orpheus and his trip to the Underworld to rescue his dead wife, Eurydice, and his failure, and eventual transmogrification to Heaven by the God Apollo. Back then, all the female roles were played in drag by castrato men singing in high register. Today, sopranos and mezzos get the job back. 

George Frideric Handel wrote 43 operas and another 27 oratorios, some of which have been staged as operas. Giulio Cesare in Egitto (“Julius Caesar in Egypt”) was premiered in 1724 in London and was a big hit. It tells the story of Cleopatra’s rise to the throne of Egypt with Caesar’s help in killing her brother, the villain Tolomeo. There is a love story and 30 arias over three acts (and three-and-a-half hours), with many choruses, duets and ariosos added. And three castrato parts, including that of Caesar. 

Wolfgang Mozart wrote some of the most popular operas ever, including Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni (“The Rake Punished, or Don Giovanni”), which premiered in Prague in 1787 to rapturous applause. The villain is the seducer, Don Giovanni (Don Juan in Italian), but also the hero, whose irrepressible life force means that as he is dragged down to hell by demons, he still refuses to repent. 

Gioacchino Rossini wrote two operas a year for 19 years and then gave up in exhaustion at the age of 30, spending the rest of retirement living the good life. He wrote Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione (“The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution”) over three weeks in 1816. In it, the barber, Figaro, plays matchmaker to Count Almaviva and young Rosina. Lots of comic miscalculations and tunes you can’t get out of your head.  

Giuseppe Verdi was the king of 19th century Italian opera. He wrote 37 operas, counting re-write and recastings, including some of the most popular and most familiar. In 1853, he wrote La Traviata (“The Trollop”), which follows Violetta, the mistress of Alfredo over the objections of his father. She coughs. She agrees to give up her love. She dies. Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the gist. 

The soldier Don Jose falls for the sultry Gypsy, Carmen. She throws him over for the handsome matador. Don Jose kills Carmen. Simple enough, but what melodies. Georges Bizet wrote it in 1875 and died soon after, never knowing it would become one of the three or four most popular operas ever (the famous “Big Three ABCs” being Aida, Boheme, and Carmen). 

One of the great tearjerkers of all time, La Bohème (“The Bohemian Life”) by Giacomo Puccini, from 1896, follows four impoverished Parisian artists living in a garret, and how one of them falls in love with a sweet young doxie living upstairs, named Mimi. They sing, they party, they fall apart, they lament and then she dies of consumption. This is an opera that even people who hate opera love. How can you not?

The 20th century took a darker turn. In 1905 Richard Strauss premiered his opera about a dysfunctional family and the prophet John the Baptist, in which the king’s daughter does a kinky strip tease for her father and winds up kissing the decapitated head of the prophet. The opera was banned in many countries, for both blasphemy and obscenity, but it is now always guaranteed to fill seats. 

This short, one-act, two-singer Symbolist opera by Bela Bartok was written in 1911. The Duke Bluebeard takes his new wife to his gloomy castle and forbids her to open seven doors, which, as any wife would, she proceeds to open, one by one, discovering dangerous hidden secrets of her spouse. The work was slow to catch on — it’s Austrian premiere wasn’t until 1978 — but it now has over 30 recordings. Beautiful and creepily atmospheric.

There are few “perfect” operas. Most have a few dull moments, or plots that make no sense, but the deeply disturbing Expressionist Wozzeck is as close to perfect as possible. Alban Berg’s complex work, premiered in 1925, tells a story of a miserable German soldier and his unfaithful wife, and the murders that result. The music matches the story perfectly, and if the final scene — what might be called “pressurized empathy” — doesn’t leave you in horrified tears, you haven’t been paying attention.  

Peter Grimes is an unpleasant English fisherman whose apprentice has died. Many in the village believe Grimes has murdered him. When a second apprentice also dies, apparently by accident in Act Two, Grimes, who has never had a sure grasp of his mind, is hounded by the villagers to his death at sea. Or not. It is implied but not shown. This is an opera of implication and innuendo, of outsider and mob. Different productions take different sides, and so do audiences. In some productions, he is actually a murderer, in others the audience sympathy is all toward the unlucky outsider. The opera, by Benjamin Britten, was premiered in 1945.  

Whatever else you think of Richard Nixon, he is the only recent historical figure that could warrant a Shakespeare play. What he does get is John Adams’ 1987 opera Nixon in China, about the president’s 1972 visit to Beijing. Nixon, his wife, Pat, Chou En-Lai, Mao Zedong, and Madame Mao all have moments that illuminate their inner thoughts, and then there is a Chinese ballet in the second act and a lot of pageantry, and a surprising number of truly memorable arias. 

I want to make a special pleading for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of the Julie Taymor Magic Flute. It is a shortened version of Mozart’s most popular opera, with all the stage magic and glitter an opera can offer, and aimed especially at younger audiences. Nobody doesn’t like Taymor’s Magic Flute. 

PART 3: OPERA WORDS

A glossary of opera terms

Aria: An opera singer’s solo — a song on steroids.

Baritone: The second lowest male voice, usually a villain.

Basso: The lowest male voice, when not a villain is usually a king. Sometimes both.

Bel Canto: Italian for “showing off.” A type of Italian opera with especially florid vocal writing.

Buffa: Comic.

Castrato: A male soprano, made so by the once popular practice of castrating teenage boys before their voices cracked. A practice now generally frowned upon.

Chamber operas: Works with a small cast and a small orchestra.

Chest voice: The deepest and strongest register of a voice.

Coloratura: A singer specializing in vocal acrobatics.

Comprimario: Sidekick.

Contralto: The lowest female voice, often used for earthier, sexier parts, rather than the “good-girl” parts the soprano gets stuck with.

Counter-tenor: When not enough boys volunteered to be castratos, they settled for tenors who sang falsetto.

Da Capo: (“from the top” in Italian) – a term used to describe an aria in two parts that circles back to the first part before it finishes.

Diva: A celebrated female singer, aka pain in the neck.

Fach: Pronounced as if you are clearing your throat; it is the term for the subcategory of voice types: a light soprano or dramatic soprano; a spinto tenor or a heldentenor (heroic tenor).

Gesamtkunstwerk: Richard Wagner’s word for the “complete art work”; an opera in which the words, music, staging and choreography are all created by the same monomaniac.

Grand Opera

Grand Opéra: Opera with elephants, or lacking that, large ships, and with elaborate scenery and costumes, telling an epic or historic story, with added ballet. Once popular in France.

Habanera: A type of Cuban dance in a swinging rhythm made famous by Carmen.

 Head voice: The highest, emptiest register of the human voice. The singer’s ability to switch from chest to head tones without anyone noticing is especially prized by opera connoisseurs. Whole reviews are based on whether this occurs in a performance or not.

Leitmotiv: A tune that keeps coming back, like cucumbers. It signals a character or event. If you know Darth Vader’s tune from Star Wars, you know how a leitmotiv works.

Libretto: The words.

Mezzo-soprano: The midrange of the female voice. Mezzos often play either the heavy or the “trouser role,” i.e., a cross-gender part in which they pretend to be young males. Kin-ky. Hence the saying that mezzos play “witches, bitches and boys.” Carmen is a mezzo. She is not a boy.

Minimalism: a compositional style from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with a lot of repetitive note patterns, and note patterns that are repeated, and patterns of notes that are repeated, and slightly changed. 

Number opera: An opera with discrete arias and ensembles, each of which is numbered in the score.

Opera: One syllable or two? Opp-ruh, or Opp-uh-ruh? 

Opera Seria: (“serious opera” in Italian) – an opera based on a serious subject, often historical or mythological, sung in Italian. Someone usually dies. 

Opera Buffa: (“funny opera” in Italian) – an Italian opera that tells a humorous story, with roots in early-18th century Naples. Usually, no one dies. 

Opéra Comique: (“comic opera” in French) – a style of French opera, often with serious stories, despite its name. 

Overture: The music the orchestra plays while the audience reads its programs.

Prima donna: The star.

Recitative: Pronounced “retch-ta-teev” and for a reason. The parts that would be spoken in a musical, but are sung in a quasi-singsong fashion in opera. 

Regie oper: Literally, “Director’s opera.” A recent trend where the person in charge of the production places his ego center stage and leaves the music taking a back seat. It tends to  mean placing Figaro in a subway station or Tosca on the moon. It is a fad; it will pass.

Rescue Opera: TV sitcoms are not the only art form with familiar plots reworked to death. Usually the hero rescues the fair maid.

Singspiel: A kind of German opera in which audiences don’t have to endure recitative.

Soprano: The highest female voice, reserved for heroines, because the high voice is best for expressing distress.

Sprechstimme: An early form of rap, when the singer half-sings, half-speaks the words. Especially popular in German Expressionist operas. 

Tenor: The high male voice, usually the hero and usually half the size of the heroine.

Verismo: An Italian style of opera that tells stories about regular (i.e. poor) people and their jealousies and betrayals. Usually ends in a murder.

As always, click on any image to enlarge

Naming names

November 29, 2025
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We’ve all heard of Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, or Suleiman the Magnificent. Who wouldn’t want to be known to history by such flattering names? But among the many kings, princes, barons and otherwise leaders, there are a few names a bit less splendiferous.

Alexander the Great; William the Conqueror; Suleiman the Magnificent

Every literate English speaker has probably heard of Ethelred the Unready, but what about Ivar the Boneless? We think of the third Julian Roman emperor as Caligula, although his actual name was Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. “Caligula” was a less-than-laudatory nickname which actually means “little boots,” because when he was a boy, he tried wearing a real soldiers footware and the troopers made fun of him by calling him Little Boots, or “Bootsie.”

But the list of unflattering cognomens, sobriquets and nicknames is really quite long. Not everyone was the Sun King. There was also Sebastian the Asleep of Portugal, who reigned from 1554 to 1578. And Barefoot Magnus III of Norway (1073-1103). Or Johann Georg the Beer Jug, Elector of Saxony from 1611 to 1656. As you might have surmised, he loved to bend his elbow. 

Alfonso the Leper; Ivaylo the Cabbage; Piero the Gouty

None of these men seem to have had press agents spinning their boss’ reputations. Richard I may have been Lion-Hearted, but the Third was Richard Crookback. Ivaylo the Cabbage ruled Bulgaria in the 13th century. The grandson of Barefoot Magnus ruled Norway from 1130 to 1135 as Magnus the Blind. Vasili Kosoi ruled Moscow in the 15th century as Vasili the Cross-eyed. And, of course, Charles the Bald, or Charles II of France, who apparently had a full head of hair. 

Physical debility seems to have been popular. William the One-Eyed of Meissen; Peter the Stutterer of Portugal; Sverker the Clubfoot of Sweden; Piero the Gouty of Florence; Alfonso the Leper of Portugal. Eric XI of Sweden (1216-1250) was called Eric the Lisp and Lame.

 The most famous was probably Timur the Lame, who conquered much of the world and best known as Tamerlane. And don’t forget Uros the Weak of Serbia. Or Wilfred the Hairy of Catalonia. 

Wilfred the Hairy; Ethelred the Unready; Halfdan the Bad Entertainer

The 1100s featured Bolesłav the Curly in Poland, Conan the Fat in Brittany, and Ragnvald Roundhead in Sweden. 

John the Posthumus was born in France in 1316 after his father’s death and so was born a king already. He lived only a few days, and so was king from birth to death. 

In AD741 Constantine was born in Byzantium and when he was baptized, the infant defecated in the baptismal font and so became ever after Emperor Constantine the Dung Named. 

Sancho the Populator was king of Portugal in the 13th century (that nation seems to get a lot of these names). He had 20 children, both legitimate and otherwise. But he is beat out by John the Babymaker of the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century, who had 63 illegitimate kids. Something for Elon Musk to aim for, I guess. 

On the other hand, there was Henry the Impotent of Castile in the 15th C. and nasty old King John of England was called John Soft-Sword. 

Louis Do-Nothing; Louis the Unavoidable; James the Shit

England has had its share of names, some glorious, like Elizabeth I as Gloriana, but otherwise, there was George IV, known as the Prince of Whales because of his obesity, and George III, known as derisively as Farmer George for his less-than-regal interest in agriculture. And James II was known in Ireland as Seamus as Chaca or “James the Shit” for his treatment of that country.

I love encountering these historical names. Constantius the Pale was Roman emperor. Stupid Willy was Wilhelm I of Germany. Louis Do-Nothing was Louis V of France. Germany had Wenceslaus the Drunkard. And Portugal (again) had Manuel I, the Grocer-King. 

Coloman the Bookish ruled Hungary in the 12th century and Ivan I of Russia was Ivan Moneybags. And King Ludwig of Bavaria was Mad King Ludwig. And while Vlad Tepec is remembered to history as “Vlad the Impaler” and the model for Dracula, Besarab IV gained the throne of Wallachia with Vlad’s help and was then known as Besarab Tepalus, or “The Little Impaler.”

Then, there’s Alfonso the Slobberer, King of Galicia from 1188-1230, who foamed at the mouth when angered. And Eystein Halfdansson, an 8th century Norwegian king known as Eystein the Fart. Eystein’s son was known as Halfdan the Bad Entertainer — couldn’t throw a decent party. Another Norwegian king, from the 13th century was Haakon the Crazy. King Harald I of Norway from 1454 to 1474 had several names. He was Harald Fairhair, but that may have been meant ironically, since he was also Harald Tanglehair, Harald Shockhead and Harald the Lousy.  

Harald Tanglehair, aka Harald the Lousy

Finally, Eric II of Denmark was Eric the Memorable but doesn’t seem to have done anything of note in his short four-year reign, at least not that anyone can remember.

These are just a few epithets and sobriquets. Wikipedia lists more than 200 historical figures once named as “The Great,” From Abbas the Great of Iran (1587-1629) to Zayn al-Abadin the Great, Sultan of Kashmir (1418-1470). Alexander the Great wasn’t called that until the Roman playwright Plautus named him that in a play, Mostellaria, in the Third Century BCE. He was also known, in Persia as Iskander the Accursed. 

A list of monarchs by nickname in Wikipedia contains a thousand entries, some quite familiar, like Ivan the Terrible, some more obscure, such as Piero the Gouty of Florence, Italy. 

Constantine Dung-Named; Childeric the Idiot; Ferdinand the Bomb

Some have more than one alternate identity. Napoleon Bonaparte had at least 21, including L’Aiglon (The Eagle), Le Petit Caporal (The Little Corporal), The Corsican, The Gunner of Toulon, Little Boney, and more. Most of them authored by his enemies, who seemed hesitant to pronounce his actual name. And so: The Nightmare of Europe, the Corsican Ogre, The Devil’s Favorite, The Fiend of Europe (or just, The Fiend). The British seemed to hate and fear Nappy the most and never seemed to run out of insulting names for the man. 

Superstition about saying certain names out loud have given us many of these. Avoiding the name of the Devil has given us a bunch of  folktale cognomens: Old Scratch, Old Nick, The Evil One Split-Foot, Father of Lies, Green-horned Monster, Jimmy Square-Foot, Old Adam, Tail-N-Horns, the Wicked One, Rule of Demons. 

Which brings us to Donald John Trump. No one recently has accrued so many alternate cognomens, epithets or sobriquets. One single website lists 409 of them. Nixon might have been Tricky Dick and Clinton was Slick Willy, but no one before has had them delivered by the truckload. I stopped looking after about 800 of them. (I’m not going to list them all — I haven’t the heart). Everyone has their favorites. 

They fall into several vast categories: His lying; his heft; his thin skin; his greed and self-dealing; his tweeting; his name-calling; his business failures; his sexual predation; his fascism; his failing mental powers; his word salad — the list goes on. And let’s not forget his orange hue or his hair, or his too-long ties, his golf cheating, or his bragging or the garish bad taste of a tinpot dictator. He makes it easy. 

In his first term I began calling him — Moose-a-Loony. It’s almost a party game to make up new to call him. It’s fun; try it. Orange Foolius. (Although younger readers might not know where that one comes from.) Large-mouth Ass. Keep it going. Your turn. 

Among my favorites: Trumplethinskin: Trumpster Fire; Mango Mussolini; Cheat-O; Tangerine Palpatine; Mar-a-Lardo; Captain Bonespur; Hair Furor; Prima Donald; Assaulter-in-Chief; Boss Tweet; Deadbeat Donald; the Lyin’ King; The Man of Steal; Forrest Trump; Donny Dementia. Use these and no one needs to be told who you are referring to. The Creature from the Orange Lagoon. 

Everyone who wants is free to invent more of them. Late night talk show hosts seem to come up with new ones each night for a good laugh. 

Stephen Colbert called him the Orange Manatee; John Oliver said he was Rome Burning in Man Form; Seth Meyers dubbed him Creep Throat; Jon Stewart said he was a Decomposing Jack-O-Lantern. Samantha Bee called him a Screaming Carrot Demon, and also America’s Burst Appendix. Trevor Noah said he was a Pile of Old Garbage Covered in Vodka Sauce (although I would have thought “ketchup” more apt). 

The characterization that seems to have gotten under the Tangerine-Tinted Trashcan Fire (S. Bee) more than any other was delivered almost 40 years ago in 1988 when Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter called him a “short-fingered vulgarian.” 

Carter said that he made the comment “just to drive him a little bit crazy.” And according to Carter, it still does.

“To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him — generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers,” Carter said. “I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.”

But whether his fingers are abnormally short or not, there is no question he is a vulgarian. Every time DJT opens his pie-hole he demonstrates how little class he possesses. “Quiet, Piggy!” 

And so, we keep renaming the Yam-colored Yammerer, as if we don’t want to have to say his name. 

A linguist named Jenny Lederer said, “people feel like not repeating his name is [a way of] not speaking to the brand and the value system that goes along with his political ideology.”

Even a mention of his name is a problem, with a kind of folk-magic power, causing many of us to avoid it. Tweets will spell the name “Tr*mp,” like it’s a four-letter profanity, although that doesn’t really hide the name, but it does make the Tweet unsearchable by the keyword, “Trump,” and so limits its spread.  And the asterisk implies that his name is vulgar, like the the dirty words censored in old books. 

One is left to wonder what posterity (if there is posterity) will finally settle on as the epithet for “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” 

We have Old Hickory, Honest Abe, Silent Cal, the Gipper, Bubba and Dubya — but how will we ever choose from the superfluity of imprecations  swirling around Trump as he circles the drain? 

Opera I can’t live without

April 29, 2025
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I once made a list of my Top Ten Films and the list had 40 movies on it. What is more, if I had made the list a year before, or a year later, the 40 movies might have been quite different. One cannot really pick a permanent set. 

So, when Classics Today executive editor David Hurwitz published his list of “12 Operas I Cannot Live Without,” and challenged his audience to come up with their own lists, the same problem popped up. “You mean the dozen I cannot live without today?”

While I love opera, like Hurwitz, I have to admit I am not an opera nut. That’s a different breed. Opera does seem to attract the crazies — the ones who swear by a 1948 barely audible recording, made over a telephone line, of Maria Callas singing La Sonnambula — in the unauthorized 1848 edition only performed once, in Belfast, Ireland in 1873. You know, the one with the interpolated aria in Act 2. Yes, crazy like that. 

I have been listening to classical music for more than 60 years, and am a classical music generalist: I love it all, from pianists to chamber music to symphonic and vocal music — and, of course, opera. But opera has no special place for me. Opera people care who the tenor is; I am more interested in the composer, which means I’m not included in the opera inner circle. 

So, my list is not made up of the usual names: Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, and doesn’t automatically include the ABCs of opera popularity — Aida, Boheme, Carmen. It’s not that I dislike them, but I have seen them enough times that I don’t need to experience them yet again. They will always sell enough tickets, even without my attendance. 

These are the works that I choose when I want to hear opera, to enjoy the music in them and the emotions they arouse. I could list more than 12, but Hurwitz’s assignment limits the number — although I might cheat a bit.

1. Handel: Rodelinda

The first opera I ever attended was in 1966 when the Handel Society of New York staged Rodelinda at Carnegie Hall with Teresa Stich-Randall and Maureen Forrester with a pick-up pit orchestra conducted by Brian Priestman. I couldn’t stop humming the tunes. 

Years later, I found a three-disk LP album of the opera in a smooshed-up box in a thrift store. I don’t remember who performed it, probably some Eastern Europe company on a back-water label no one’s ever heard of. I played it over and over. The familiar melodies were comforting.

The same year I saw Rodelinda, the same group also performed Xerxes and I saw that, too. Since, I have seen Giulio Cesare live and a truly brilliant staging of Semele by the Arizona Opera Company, but it is Rodelinda that sticks.

2. Mozart: Don Giovanni

The opera I have seen most, and that I love as music as well as theater, is Don Giovanni. I’ve seen it more often than any other live opera (except the infinite Bohemes and Carmens I saw through duty as my newspaper’s opera critic). 

Most operas, even the really good ones, can not be defended on the basis of their plots, which are, at best, nonsensical and goofy. But Don Giovanni has a story with action, believable characterizations, and psychological subtlety. To say nothing of some really great tunes. 

And it is a truly revolutionary work, written at a revolutionary moment in history. I love when the partygoers at the end of the first act just kind of stop everything and belt out the words, “Viva la Libertad!” And also that, at the end, the Don has the courage to refuse to repent. He may be the villain of the piece, but he is also the hero. 

I’ve owned a half-dozen versions of the piece on LP and now CD, but my go-to performance is the oddly cinematic, opened-up film staging with Cesare Siepi as the Don, and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, available on DVD. 

3. Mozart: Nozze di Figaro

On his list, Hurwitz permits only one opera per composer, but I can’t do that, because the three operas I love most, and can listen to over and over, are all by Mozart. Years ago, I wrote about what I was calling the “perfect” operas — that is, those with no longueurs, boring parts, added and unnecessary show-off arias to highlight the tenor or soprano. These are operas with plots that are defensible, if not great, pacing that doesn’t drag, and some level of human reality in them. 

By any of those standards La Nozze di Figaro tops the list. These are all real people doing real people things, hurting like real people, loving like real people, and most importantly, forgiving like real people. And, all the the perfectly psychologically apt music of Mozart. If I were to choose the best opera ever written, this would be it.

4. Mozart: Zauberflöte

Talk of silly plots: Just about the worst story in opera is found in one of the most popular works. Everything about the story in The Magic Flute is preposterous. But the music is so infectious, you give up and don’t care.

Especially if you get to see the staging by Julie Taymor with its giant bunraku puppets. It is stage magic along with great music. It is a slightly abridged version and sung in English, but it is so good, and so much fun, you really have to watch it. 

Or there’s Ingmar Bergman’s film version, sung in Swedish, which captures all the fairy-tale flavor of the thing. But really, there are dozens of recorded versions, both on CD for listening and DVD or Blu-Ray for watching. 

5. Berlioz: Le Damnation de Faust

I hadn’t ever thought of it as an opera, but I saw the Metropolitan Opera staging of it in 2009 and was persuaded: It works really well in that Postmodern presentation. Actually thrilling. 

As with so much of Berlioz, its reach much exceeds its grasp. Since the composer couldn’t include everything from even Part 1 of Goethe’s Faust, he chose to pick episodes to put to music, making a rather choppy story. Still, the music can be overwhelming when performed with the right belief and energy.  

6. Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen

I’ve attended two live Ring cycles, which were quite magnificent (although I am humbled by the fact my dear friend, the late Dimitri Drobatschewsky went to Bayreuth 16 times). But I have to admit this four-opera trilogy (yes, that’s an oxymoron) is best heard on recordings. Not so much because with the great voices of the past, the singing is better (although that is true), but because the action in these “music dramas” is so mythic, and so German Romantic, that no scenery or stage machinery can adequately portray the Rhine maidens singing underwater, the valkyries riding their horses in the air, the gods crossing a rainbow bridge, or the Rhine river overflowing its banks to quench the fire that has set alight the entire world and ended the reign of the gods. Watching it onstage can seem a little tawdry. 

But listening to the recording with your eyes closed and imagining the rocky crags, the dark forests, the ring of fire on the mountain top, is so much more convincing as theater of the mind. I say with eyes closed, but you really also need to read the libretto as you listen. Or not libretto — that sounds too much like opera — Wagner doesn’t have a libretto; he has a text. 

I have five Ring cycles on CD (Barenboim, Böhm, Furtwängler, Janowski and Solti) and another two on DVD (Boulez and Levine). Is that a little nuts? I suppose. The one I listen too over and over is Solti, which was specifically designed to be played on speakers, with various sound effects added to it by producer John Culshaw. 

And yes, I’m counting all 15 hours of the Ring as a single entry. 

7. Offenbach: Les Contes d’Hoffmann

If the Ring is too serious, The Tales of Hoffmann counters with frivolity. I love this mini-trilogy (in four parts), especially when all three heroines are sung by the same soprano. 

It has some of the chunky episodic feeling of the Berlioz, (compare the Chanson de Kleinzach tavern song here with Mephistopheles’ Song of the Flea in Damnation. Both completely extrinsic to the story, but a chance for the composers to interpolate a great bit of ditty. 

The opera is a bit of a mess, as Offenbach never settled on a final version. But any version is a delight.

8. Strauss: Salome

I’ve seen several versions of Richard Strauss’ first opera, and it always seems to work on stage. It’s a short one, in a single act and tells of King Herod, his wife and daughter — Salome — and the prisoner John the Baptist, who Salome has a “thing” for. The prophet rejects her advances and she dances a striptease and has her daddy behead the prophet, whereupon she kisses the severed head. Grand Guignol, for sure, but great music and a surefire staging. 

If the Ring fares best on recording, this opera needs to be seen live (or at least on DVD). It is as much theater as music. 

9. Bartok: Bluebeard’s Castle

Another short, one-act work of psycho-sexual complexity, Bela Bartok’s early work, which seems to take place entirely in the nation of Allegory, tells the story of Duke Bluebeard and his new wife, who can’t seem to let alone the secrets of her husband’s previous marriages. She forces the secrets out and winds up prisoned with all of them. All very Freudian.

Those secrets are hidden behind doors, and as she opens each door, she finds a world of shimmering music and deadly horrors. There are only two singers/actors in this story, one who wants to uncover the past, and the other who begs her to let them lie. But it is the impressionistic score that makes this work so irresistible.

10. Berg: Wozzeck

There is a second “perfect” opera, after The Marriage of Figaro, one with no unnecessary bits, and everything leading to a single inescapable and shattering climax. It is written in a sort of atonal, 12-tone style (purely Berg’s own version) and is both musically inevitable, and emotionally devastating. Too many people avoid this work, fearing the music will be too dissonant, but every note serves a purpose, and even those fearing to enter the opera house will likely leave knowing they have experienced a work of utter genius. 

I claim Wozzeck as my favorite opera of all. There are many versions on disc. This is another one, like Salome, where it is so well designed for performance that almost any version will do, and it’s amazing how many versions there are on Amazon. A serial opera that is actually popular!

11. Adams: Nixon in China

Initially, I thought this piece by John Adams was a gimmick, but I saw it performed in concert by the Phoenix Symphony under Michael Christie and it blew me away. As no other contemporary work for the opera stage, this has joined the repertoire. (Did anyone else notice how the showstopping aria, “I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung” is a gloss on the“Tuba Mirum” section of Mozart’s Requiem?)  

No other figure in recent American history figures as so deeply mythic as Richard Nixon — a version of Nixon he seems to have bought into himself (check out the opening line of his autobiography: “I was born in the house my father built.” Can’t get much more Jungian.)

12. Golijov: Ainadamar

Christie also brought Dawn Upshaw to Phoenix to perform Osvaldo Golijov’s Postmodern take on the death of Spanish poet Garcia Lorca. With its mix of musical styles and bouncy, infectious score, it tells of the Spanish actress Margarita Xirgu, who recounts the life and execution of her friend Lorca. 

Like all great tragedies, it is both depressing at emotionally exhilarating at the same time. To say nothing of it now being an uncomfortably historical warning about fascist governments. 

There seems to be only a single recording of the opera, but with Upshaw in the lead role. The opera led me to seek out other music by Golijov, and I have loved all of it. 

Postlude

You may wonder, where is Verdi? Rossini? Puccini? Are they not worthy? Of course they are, and I love them, too. And how can I have omitted Rosenkavalier, which I love to pieces? There is so much more that could have been included, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo to Weill’s Dreigroschenoper. 

But this is a list of operas I can’t live without, the ones closest to my heart. The one’s that will make me actually buy tickets. Your list will be different, but if my selection prompts you to try something new, so much the better. 

And, finally, seeing opera (with one exception, noted above) is always better than just hearing it. Live is best of all, but DVDs will do in a pinch, and many movie theaters present showings of operas live on their screens, most famously the Metropolitan Opera. Check with your local theaters to see where such performances might be scheduled.