A Night at the Opera Workshop

This Wednesday I attended the opera workshop that was held. There were many great singers that sang short arias. The point of the workshop was to show how the singers would prepare their pieces for auditions and how they would get their emotions that would drive their pieces. 

Many of the pieces were very similar to the Enlightenment music that we studied in class. Four of the pieces were actually composed by Mozart who was a key enlightenment composer. One of the arias "Madamina! Il catologo e questo" was actually from the opera Don Giovanni that we had studied in class. This particular piece was when Leporello encounters one of Don Giovanni's former conquests, who has just learned the truth about her former lover. I was able to hear a few of the phrases that we learned in class. There seemed to be a few parallel interrupted and parallel sectional periods in the piece. I thought that this was a really cool piece, it was sung by a baritone and i really was able to understand what was going on in the scene, even though I did not speak the language. 

In all the pieces, I was pleasantly surprised about the extent to which I was able to understand what was going on. The short blurbs definitely helped to get me part of the way, but the acting was what really sold it for me. In the piece "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi, I was really able to see the pain that Lauretta was going though when she was begging her father to allow her to marry the man that she loves. 

The instrumentation for each of the pieces that was shown was very simple. They only used the piano, so that they were able to emphasize the singers voices as the main instrument in each piece. I thought that it was amazing the range that they all had and how they were able to move their voices around the octaves so fluidly.

I was pretty surprised how much I enjoyed this workshop. I am not a huge opera fan, mainly because I don't like when the soprano's go into the extremely high register. For me that is like nails on a chalkboard, but I found that when I was invested in the scene, I did not mind the high notes as much. I'm not sure if I would go to a full opera quite yet, but I would be open to going to another workshop.