Learning about Opera By Books and Bits

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Last week I picked up a book from the Squirrel Hill branch of the Pittsburgh Public Library -- Sir Denis Forman's A Night at the Opera. I had been looking for exactly this type of book because I've long wanted to immerse myself in the study of opera -- both Western and Chinese. Forman's book is primarily composed of chapters devoted to individual operas. Chapters have plot summaries, musical highlights, and overall critical appreciations/evaluations of specific operas.

I've long wanted to broaden my knowledge of opera. It's certainly not a bad thing for me to reacquaint myself with the operas I've already listened to dozens of times. (Some great opera are boundlessly rich.) Operas with which I already have some level of familiarity include:

  • Mozart's Don Giovanni, Marriage of Figaro, Magic Flute, and Così fan tutte
  • Puccini's La bohème
  • bits and pieces from Wagner's Ring Cycle (primarily Das Rheingold, the first of four operas in the cycle)
  • Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise.

But I want to grow beyond listening over and over again to the same operas. There must be many new friends to be found -- Forman's book lists a good set to try out. But which ones to start with? It might be a caricature to say that the big three composers and Western opera are Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi. I've long wanted to learn more about Giuseppe Verdi. so I would pick one of his operas but which one?

When I saw that Verdi's La Traviata is being performed in San Francisco next year, I decided to start with that opera. The opportunity to see a live performance of an opera under study is too much to pass p on.. So La Traviata it would be to start. (Moreover, Forman gives a rave review for La Traviata -- ( grading it as an "alpha plus") -- so this opera seems to be as good a place to start as any other Verdi opera. It turns that La Traviata is been extremely popular opera in general (it's #3 on a list of the 20 most performed operas in North America). Moreover, the Met is also performing it this season.

Rhapsody for online listening

As much as I would love to spend my time (and money) attending live opera, most of my exposure to opera will be through recordings. I was a big fan and subscriber of Yahoo! Music Unlimited when it was still in operation. I am even happier with Rhapsody (which took over my subscription), primarily because it gives me access to a substantial online classical music collection. (Classical music was not represented at all in Yahoo! Music.)

(By the way, there is also an API for Rhapsody. It be interesting to quickly brainstorm what I would use it for. (One idea comes to mind: writing a mashup that lets me quickly correlate albums that correspond to a given work -- for example, something that shows me a list of all the recordings of La Bohème))

I've been listening to music primarily through Rhapsody's desktop client (for Windows XP) although the web interface is intriguing for not only providing cross-platform access to my account but also the possibility of generating URLs to correspond to the given work or album or even track. (Unfortunately, the search results from the web interface cannot seem to be as good as those that come from the desktop interface. For instance, I had a hard time locating many recordings of Così fan tutte using the web interface. I wonder how well the API works for searching for albums.)

Wikipedia as a source of information about opera

The Wikipedia turns out to be an incredible source of basic taxonomic information about operas is in general. There is, of course, the article about the opera itself ( La traviata - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) as well as the composer (Giuseppe Verdi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). There are all sorts of efforts to list and categorize operas and their composers:

In addition, there's an effort to identify important operas and major composers. There are categories lists which are computed:

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