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As an opera fan, you may be familiar with the range of opera voices and basic opera terms. If you’re a more recent aficionado, you may benefit from tips on how to choose an opera to attend and what to do when you’re at the opera house. And any opera lover can benefit from scanning a timeline of some of the greatest operas ever written.
Opera Voices and Their Ranges
In opera, you can subdivide the human voice into dozens of finely differentiated categories, but the following figure shows the Big Six and their ranges shown on a piano keyboard:
Tips for Choosing and Attending an Opera
Going to a live opera performance isn’t like going to a movie. For one thing, you’re paying ten times as much for a ticket. For another, you’ll be experiencing some pretty strange sights and sounds. Follow this checklist for best results:
- Choose the right opera. Operas — their music and their stories — are 100 percent as varied as today’s movies. Some are delightful romantic romps, such as The Marriage of Figaro and The Elixir of Love. The majority are heart-rending love tragedies, like La Bohème and Aïda. A few are nearly X-rated shockers featuring adolescent mother-killers (Elektra) or teenage necrophiliacs (Salome). Don’t walk into something you’re not ready for — especially if you’re on a hot date.
- Get to know the opera in advance. The opera’s probably in a foreign language, it may be set in an exotic time and place, and it may have a complicated plot. By renting the video or listening to the CD (while following the words) beforehand, you’ll be familiar with the story going into the gate. Your opera-going experience will be 50 times better.
- Eat. Going to an opera isn’t like going to Fiddler on the Roof — it’s probably much longer, especially if Richard Wagner wrote the show. Eat something light before you go, and then have a full dinner afterward. (Unless it’s Wagner. Then take food to the show, which you can scarf down during the intermissions.)
- Arrive early. The people-watching alone is worth the ticket price. How many opera snobs can you find?
- Check out the orchestra pit. The instrumental musicians — half the opera’s payroll — will be hidden from view all night. Before the show starts is the time to witness all the action down there, including all the strange warm-ups that the orchestra players go through.
- Hit the restroom before the curtain goes up. Your next opportunity may be the intermission, which may be hours away. Moreover, the 2,000 audience members will be trying to get into a restroom designed to hold 6. Ladies: This especially means you. Unless you want to stand in a line that could stretch to the moon and back seven times, go before the show.
Opera Vocabulary
You’re at the opera house. You open the program book or you’re listening to the opera snobs talk, and you can’t understand a word — or at least some words. To get a handle on what they all mean, check out the following list:
aria: An emotion-expressing song in an opera; the big number. | opera buffa: Funny opera, especially from the 18th century. |
bel canto: A style of sweet singing, taught to singers even today, that emphasizes breath control, a beautiful tone, and great flexibility in dynamics (going from loud to soft, for example). | opera seria: Formal, serious opera, especially from the 18th century. |
cadenza: A moment near the end of an aria for the singer alone, with lots of fast, high, difficult notes, designed for showing off. | prima donna: The singer who plays the heroine, the main female character in an opera; or anyone who believes that the world revolves around her. |
coloratura: A singer (usually soprano) with an extremely agile, light, pure-sounding voice, capable of easily singing fast, high notes. | recitative (“ress-it-uh-TEEV”): Speech-singing, in which the singer semi-chants the words, imitating the free rhythms of speech. |
dynamics: The loudness or softness of a musical composition, or the markings in the sheet music that indicate volume. | Singspiel (“SING-shpeel”): A German opera with spoken dialogue (instead of recitative) between arias. |
Leitmotif (“LIGHT-mo-teef”): A little melody that plays every time a certain character or object appears; invented by Richard Wagner. | trouser role: A man’s part played by a woman. |
libretto: The script of an opera. | verismo: A realistic, “documentary” style of opera that depicts the seamy underbelly of life. |
Timeline of the Great Operas
What are considered great operas today have stood the test of time for hundreds of years — even thousands. The following timeline shows the progression of great opera from the 1780s to the middle of the last century:
The best way to become a better singer is to work on singing exercises that help you improve your tone and technique. These exercises can range from simple vocal warm-ups to drills that help you build your skills and fine-tune your sound. After you warm up your voice, you’re ready to tackle the world of vocal exercises, starting with a drill for practicing breath control and moving on to work on your tone.
A “Hum”able Vocal Warm-Up
Always kick off a practice session by warming up your voice for 10 to 20 minutes. Select a vocal exercise that starts in the part of your voice that’s easy to sing. Sing the warm-up exercise softly at first and then gradually increase your volume.
Here’s an exercise you can use to get your voice warmed up and ready to practice. It starts lower in your voice and gradually moves up the scale. The exercise lists the word hum because humming (singing a note with your teeth open and your lips closed) is a great way to warm up the voice. Feel free to use this exercise and move higher or lower in your range to help warm up your entire voice.
Even if you don’t read music, you can use this exercise as a warm-up because the pattern in the figure sounds like the first three notes of the chorus in “Do-Re-Mi,” the song the children sing with Maria in The Sound of Music by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Using the song as a guide, think of the notes in the pattern as using the syllables do-re-mi-re-do.
How to Develop Breath Control with the Help of a Familiar Song
Singers work on breath control — controlling the flow of air as they sing — so they can manage singing short and long phrases in songs. Practice controlling your breathing by first singing shorter phrases and then gradually working your way up to longer phrases.
An easy way to work on breath control is to sing through a familiar song, such as “Amazing Grace,” while focusing on controlling your breath. Use the following figure to remind yourself of the melody and the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” and then follow the steps to work on breath control.
- Sing through the two lines in the figure, paying attention to where you take a breath.Most likely, you sing the words “Amazing grace” and then take a breath before singing the words “how sweet the sound.”
- Sing the two lines again and pay attention to how you move your body when you inhale before and after the phrase “Amazing grace.”When you inhale, you want your ribs, sides, abdominal muscles, and back to expand. As you sing, you want those same muscles that just expanded on the inhalation to gradually move back to their normal resting position. Allowing the muscles to collapse too quickly moves the air out too quickly and doesn’t leave you with enough breath to sing the whole phrase.
- Sing “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound” before you take a breath.You may need several tries before you can comfortably make it through all these words on one breath, and you may need to practice for several days before you can sing the first two lines in one breath. Remember: You don’t want your body to be tight or to push to continue singing. If you feel your body tighten as you try a longer phrase, take a breath and try the phrase again.
A Vocal Resonance Exercise
When you sing, your voice echoes, creating vibrations throughout your head and chest. This echoing of tone is called resonance. Knowing how to change the resonance of your singing voice allows you to make a variety of sounds as you sing. Use the following steps and the accompanying figure to help you practice controlling your vocal resonance:
- Sing the first measure in the figure, sustaining the sound of the mmm as if you were humming and then moving into the ee vowel.Notice the buzzing or vibrating sensation you feel on your lips. This vibrating sensation is from the vibrations of resonance of your singing voice. The ee vowel in this measure is the vowel sound in the word me. As you sing from the mmm to the ee, try to keep the vibrations happening in the same place. You may need to practice singing this measure a few times to keep the vibrations in the same place. The apostrophes above the figure are breath marks, indicating when you should take a breath.
- Try singing the second measure, which moves from mmm to ah.The ah vowel is the sound in the first syllable of the word father. As you sing from the mmm to the ah, try to keep the vibrations in the same place (around your lips). You may feel the vibrations on the ah in the back of your mouth compared to the front of your mouth, which is likely where you felt them in Step 1 on the ee vowel.Tip: Record yourself singing through the first and second measures and then listen to the resonance. Pay attention to the change of resonance you hear from the mmm to the vowels.
- Practice singing the third measure by starting right on the ee vowel and moving to the ah vowel.Notice whether you can find the same kind of vibrations of resonance that you found when you moved from the mmm to the vowels in Steps 1 and 2.