saladscooper posted:

hi opera singer here

what kind of opera you like depends on what other kind of classical/not classical music you like and what you value in a piece of music. opera can be a really hard sell to people, especially mid-18th and early-19th century opera, because the drama is in a lot of cases subservient to the musical form and style of the day. a great example of this is Handel operas, which mostly conform to story-aria-story-aria-story-aria all the way through because that's Just How You Wrote Back Then. opera got a lot better once it started being able to have more than one soloist go at a time, imo!

commonly suggested "starter" operas are La traviata by Verdi, which by today's standards is a stuffy period drama but which has lots of catchy tunes in it, Le nozze di Figaro by Mozart, which is loooong and can be hard to follow, but has lots of fun characters, Carmen by Bizet, which has some of the most famous pieces in opera and which is a genuine thrill ride the whole way through, and La boheme by Puccini, which is okay I guess. i also recommend gilbert and sullivan for new opera fans - sullivan uses a lot of early-mid 19th century opera composers (Rossini, Donizetti, Offenbach) as the basis for his musical parody.

but there's more to opera than just pretty tunes! Puccini's Tosca is a gripping melodrama, Berg's Wozzcek is extremely dissonant and dark and depressing, Britten's The Turn of the Screw is both a creepy ghost story and a monument to the expressive power of variation form, and Peter Ash's The Golden Ticket is a funny and downright strange take on the classic Willy Wonka story. i truly believe there's an opera out there to suit anyone's taste. this is an open invitation: tell me what you like in music and I'll give you a few recommendations!