Discovering the Opera of the Classical Period & the Bel Canto

For those who aren't familiar with the vast music genre that is opera, here's a look at what the opera from the Classical and the Early Romantic Periods sound like.

CLASSICAL PERIOD OPERA
The age of enlightenment brought to the opera 'order' and 'classic taste'. Christoph Willibald Gluck turned his back on the Baroque concept of 'showcasing fantastic singers' and opted for coherence and dramatic sensibility in telling the story of the opera via music with his first reformed opera, 'Orfeo ed Euridice'. By the time Wolfgang Mozart came around, he had all the ingredients available for writing opera music that is emotional but not without restraints. The story has to be told in a believable manner, too. This is a blessing. It is a lot easier to tell one aria from another now than it was in the Baroque Period.

The preference of orchestrally accompanied recitative over secco recitative (where the sung speech is only accompanied by a harpsichord or a piano) surfaced toward the end of this era, along with the surge in popularity of the opera buffe (comic opera on story of everyday life) among the common folks while the nobles still preferred the more serious story and the formal structure of the opera seria (dramatic works on mythological or heroic theme). Also, this period benefited from a few key additional instruments to the orchestra. The most prominent one is perhaps the clarinets, which Mozart never tired of using. Also emerging in this period is the genre of Singspiel, which are German opera where the songs are connected by spoken dialog rather than sung speech.

1. GLUCK's Orphée et Eurydice
Clip:Vesselina Kasarova (Orphée) and Rosemary Joshua (Eurydice)
Another retelling of the famous myth of Orpheus. Orphée, the marvelously sympathetic Thrace musician, lost his wife Eurydice to snake bite. His lament is so unbearably heart-wrenching that Jupiter cries 'Uncle!' and sends his messenger, Cupid, to offer him a deal allowing him to descend to Hades (the Land of the Dead) to try to reason with the furies in reclaiming his wife.