Opera

Opera is a kind of theater where the story is sung instead of spoken. The performers act out a play on a stage, but they sing almost every line. A full orchestra plays music in a low pit in front of the stage. Opera began in Italy around the year 1600 and spread across Europe and the rest of the world.

The word "opera" is Italian for "work." A single opera can include singing, acting, dancing, costumes, painted scenery, and special effects. Some operas are funny love stories. Others are tragedies where the main characters die at the end. Many are based on old myths, fairy tales, or true events from history.

Singers in opera are trained to project their voices without microphones. A great opera singer can fill a hall of 3,000 people using only their lungs and throat. To do this, singers train for years. Their voices are sorted into types based on how high or low they sing. The highest woman's voice is called soprano, and the lowest man's voice is called bass. The very high notes a soprano can hit may sound impossible, but they are made by careful breath control, not shouting.

One famous early opera composer was Claudio Monteverdi, who wrote operas in the 1600s. Later, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote operas like The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro in the 1700s. In the 1800s, Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi and German composer Richard Wagner wrote some of the most famous operas of all time. Wagner's operas were huge. One of his works, called the Ring Cycle, takes about 15 hours to perform and is split into four nights.

Most operas are sung in Italian, German, French, or English. Modern opera houses solve this by showing translations on a small screen above the stage, called surtitles. That way, the audience can follow the story even if they do not speak the language.

Opera houses themselves are often grand buildings. The Sydney Opera House in Australia, with its white sail-shaped roof, is one of the most famous buildings in the world. The Metropolitan Opera in New York City seats almost 4,000 people. La Scala in Milan, Italy, has been hosting performances since 1778.

Some people think opera sounds old-fashioned. New operas are still being written every year, though, often about modern subjects like astronauts, scientists, or recent history. After more than 400 years, opera is still finding new stories to sing.