![]() Many operas are comedies - The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro are basically RomComs, just to give two examples - and even the serious ones tend to have at least some humorous parts. This is also not true the opera genre is as varied as any other. That's it." note Although cynical musicologists might say that he arrived at that definition to justify his own musicals being performed in opera houses.Ĭommon Knowledge also insists that opera is always a tragedy. Stephen Sondheim was heard to claim, "I really think that when something plays in Broadway it's a musical, and when it plays in an opera house it's opera. The actual line between musicals and opera is blurry and kind of technical, but the short of it is that opera doesn't use electronic sound equipment and musicals typically need better actors than singers. Likewise, there are musicals that have "regressed" back to including recitative among these Sung Through Musicals are Les Misérables and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and others are nearly so like The Phantom of the Opera and RENT (which to a certain extent reserves spoken dialogue for its Wham Lines!). This means there are in fact operas that have spoken dialogue, like The Magic Flute and Carmen. ![]() Because opera tended to be the theatrical equivalent of a Doorstopper, someone asked why it couldn't just be abridged by turning the recitative into dialogue this form was typically called "operetta" (to oversimplify the matter), and the only thing you have to add to that to get a modern musical is a greater inclusion of dance. While not a bad approximation, it's not always true. The public perception of the difference between opera and The Musical is that musical theatre has breaks for spoken dialogue, whereas opera is "sung through", alternating between " recitative " (which is when the plot happens and is typically sung in a less-formal style) and "arias" (big numbers where someone has a therapy session onstage ). Major opera composers include Mozart, George Frederic Handel, Giuseppe Verdi, Gioachino Rossini, Richard Wagner, Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss, though there are, of course, many more. Opera has been around since the end of the 16th century and is still going strong.
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