What is an opera?

Opera is a comprehensive and elegant art with music as the central element, and it is a theatrical stage performance art developed from music.

The word "opera" is the translation of "opera". The word comes from the French plural opus. 16, 17 century Italy called it "favolainmusica" (music story) or "drama Per musica" (musical).

Opera is a comprehensive and elegant art with music as the central element. Broadly speaking, traditional Chinese opera is the general name of drama centered on singing. Although opera has elements such as poetry, literary script and stage art, it cannot be an opera without aria and music. Although drama is also an art in a certain time and space, it also contains many factors such as literature, music, art, dance, etc., but the main means of drama art is to express stories through the language and actions of actors. Opera, on the other hand, is a comprehensive art with singing that can soak people's souls as the main part, supplemented by dramatic language.

Therefore, the lines of opera are different from the lines of drama, and they appear in the form of lyrics, which is the product of the characters in the drama not singing enough to express their inner feelings and express the conflicts in the drama during the development of the plot. This "line" itself is a kind of exquisite poetry with rhythmic beauty. Excellent drama scripts are often concise and powerful, full of rhythm, and can "express their aspirations by raising things and expressing their feelings by borrowing things." But because music is an art of time, it takes much longer to sing a song than to recite the lyrics of this song, so there should not be too many literary parts in the opera, so as not to be equivalent to the lines of a drama.

Traditional Chinese opera is a comprehensive art with extensive mass and democracy. For us, the art of traditional Chinese opera is neither strange nor unfamiliar.