OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.
Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.
So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of La traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.
Nice, hunh? Right—nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant.
But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”
To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”
So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernández once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.
Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.
Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.
The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.
