What kind of art form is the opera that foreigners often watch and what is its history?

Opera is a comprehensive art form that combines music (vocal and instrumental), drama (libretto and performance), literature (poetry), dance (folk dance and ballet), and stagecraft, and is usually composed of arias, declamations, repetitions, choruses, preludes, interludes, dance scenes, and so on (and sometimes narratives and recitations). As early as in the ancient Greek drama, there is a chorus of accompaniment, some recitation and even in the form of singing; the Middle Ages to religious stories as the theme, to promote religious views of the miracle plays and so on is also incense, constantly. But really called the "music of the drama" of modern Western opera, but the end of the 16th century, the early 17th century, with the Renaissance secularization of music and culture should be produced.

The origin of opera

It is generally believed that European opera was produced in the late 16th century. The first opera recognized in the West was Daphne (also translated as Daphne), an attempt to revive the spirit of ancient Greek drama under the influence of humanism, with librettist O. Rinuccini and composers J. Perry and J. Corsi, which was performed at the court of the Count of Florence, G. Baldi, in 1597 (said to have been completed in 1594), and which, due to the loss of the original manuscript of the play, has also been put on the stage in 1600. Due to the loss of the original manuscript, some people regard Eurydice, written in 1600 to celebrate the marriage of Henry IV, as the earliest Western opera. The popularity of opera led to the creation of the world's first opera house in Venice in 1637.

Development of Opera

Toward the end of the 17th century, the most influential opera in Rome was that of Nabucco, represented by Y. Scarlatti. Scarlatti as the representative of the Neapolitan opera school. This school did not use choral and balletic scenes in their operas, but highly developed the soloist technique, which later became known as the "beautiful voice". When this style of "singers only" went to the extreme, the original dramatic expression and ideological connotation of the opera was almost lost. Thus, in the 18th century and 20s, there was the rise of the genre of comic opera, which was based on everyday life, with witty plots and simple music. The first model of Italian comic opera is Pagolesi's "The Maid as Housewife" (premiered in 1733), which was originally an opera interlude, staged in Paris in 1752, was denigrated by the conservatives, which set off the famous "comic opera debate" in the history of opera. Out of Rousseau's handwriting, France's first comedy opera, "The Village Soothsayer" was born under the inspiration of this debate and this opera.

Italian opera was the first to be adapted in France and to be integrated into the French national culture. Lully, the founder of French opera ("lyric tragedy"), pioneered the use of ballet scenes in opera, in addition to creating solo melodies that were closely tied to the French language. In England, Purcell created the first English national opera, Didon and Aeneas, based on his country's masque tradition. In Germany and Austria, it was Haydn, Dittersdorf, Mozart and others who developed folk singing opera into German and Austrian national opera, represented by Mozart's The Magic Flute. To the 18th century, Gluck, in response to the mediocrity and superficiality of the Neapolitan opera at that time, argued that the opera must have profound content, music and drama must be unified, and the performance should be pure and natural. His ideas and works such as Orfeo and Eurydice and Iphigenia in Oleander had a great influence on the development of later operas.

After the 19th century, Italian masters such as G. Rossini, G. Verdi, G. Puccini, German R. Wagner, French G. Bizet, Russian M.I. Glinka, M.P. Mussorgsky, P.N. Tchaikovsky and so on made important contributions to the development of the opera. The "light opera" (operettta, meaning "small opera"), which took shape in the 18th century, has evolved and developed into an independent genre. It is characterized by a short structure, popular music, and the use of narration in addition to solos, repetitions, choruses, and dances. The Austrian composer Sobey and the French composer Offenbach, who was originally from Germany, were the founders of this genre.

Among the 20th-century opera composers, the early representatives were the Wagnerian-influenced Richard? Strauss ("Salome", "Knight of the Roses"); after the First World War is the principle of atonality applied to the composition of the opera Berg ("Wozzeck"); in the 40s so far there are: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Miyo, Manotti, Barbier, Orff, Giannas Dell'Ara, Hentzel, Moore, as well as the famous British composers, such as Burriton.