Beginners's Guide to Opera, please!

Hallo sue, without a doubt the best opera to start with is La Boheme.....very easy to understand even in a foreign language, the music will have you in tears. Very human, funny and so sad. It's the story of four struggling students in a cold winter in Paris. Two of them have a female companion, one is well and rather gregarious, and one who is fading fast. You just have to accept that the characters sing, and the orchestra guides your emotions. Invariably some audiences clap after certain well know arias, but thankfully in this country it's not tradition for have the singers sing the piece again - some countries do. You'll find sometime s the sets get beautifully abstract and that's great as opera. like ballet, and animation, is gloriously artificial but also searingly honest. Etiquette - well don't talk or rustle - people really do want to hear every note. Yes start with operas like Carmen, La Boheme, Madame butterfly, Rigoletto and La Traviata. enjoy this world - it is a sublime combination of music, emotion, spectacle and design. And in my forty odd years of going to an opera I have yet to see a large soprano with horns and breastplates.

Sing-alongs are definitely frowned upon. If you're a reasonably housetrained theatre goer, you won't have any issues with opera etiquette.

Sinfini has nice quick comic strip plot summaries of popular operas. Can't get more succinct.
www.sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/series/opera-strip

Personally I'd avoid Carmen, 2 good tunes and a lot of incidental muzak - it took me 20 years to see another opera after an enforced Carmen.

Don't spend a fortune on a ticket, make sure you book for a decent cast and youtube is your friend to test the waters before deciding what you like. 

Traviata or Boheme are pretty good choices as starter operas I think, or maybe some fluffy Donezetti like L'Elisir D'Amour. If you like your music a bit more hardcore and a tad dissonant, Elektra can be a fab tour de force.

The ROH recently asked what the best first timer opera is, so you've got another 50 or so opinions right here
www.roh.org.uk/news/which-opera-would-you-recommend-to-a-first-timer

Good advice here!

I got into opera after going to the ENO on a special offer and realising I'd developed a new expensive hobby. Took a long time after my first opera though - I was dragged to one as a child and hated it.

Stories and genres: I've got a copy of this - www.faber.co.uk/9780571306824-the-faber-pocket-guide-to-opera.html - which is an accessible introduction to Opera in general with overviews of different genres, composers, and background info and synopses of most widely performed operas. Also the programme will generally have a full synopsis, and there will almost certainly by surtitles, so you should have no problem following things.

Etiquette - as above, just the same as for theatre and musicals, only difference is no applause until the end of an act (usually! Just don't be the first to applaud and you'll be fine!). Some people get dressed up but you won't feel out of place in whatever you'd wear to the theatre.

Worth bearing in mind that the approach of the director of a production will have a huge impact on it. Could be a very traditional production or something with a "concept" imposed by the director which may or may not succeed. (I prefer the latter but opinions vary!) Many productions are revived regularly by the same house (or are co-productions with other international opera companies) so you can investigate reviews to get some idea of what's in store. Or ask here!

A key practical difference with other forms of theatre is that runs are very short - generally less than 10 performances of each production in a season, although often they will be revived later. Often there are longer runs with multiple casts of the very popular operas (La Traviata, La Boheme, etc)

For the Royal Opera House (ROH) and English National Opera (ENO) there are a couple of useful FAQs on the (sadly defunct) Intermezzo blog -
intermezzo.typepad.com/intermezzo/faqs_the_roh_wont_tell_yo.html and intermezzo.typepad.com/intermezzo/english-national-opera-faqs.html

As you are (I think?) in Gloucester you could give the Welsh National Opera a go for starters - they have a good reputation, and you'll be able to get good seats much more cheaply than for the ROH and ENO. This year they are doing Barber of Seville, Marriage of Figaro and (later) Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci which I'd say are all pretty accessible. Also worth looking at Opera North, English Touring Opera, and the Glyndebourne Tour. On the other hand I would give the Ellen Kent productions which regularly tour the UK a wide berth (the Bill Kenwright of the opera world )

Ticket prices for the ROH and ENO - top price tickets are scarily expensive but don't let that put you off. For the ROH seats in the Amphitheatre (highest level circle) are good value although distant from the stage. However you'll probably need to book early in the booking period for the best cheapish seats. Occasional offers appear for stalls seats at the ROH for productions which aren't selling. If you don't need to plan ahead, most ENO productions turn up on TKTS for ~£30, there are regular offers too. Check theatremonkey. Also the ENO has a couple of bargain schemes - "Secret Seats" for £20 which could be anywhere in the auditorium (book early to get these), and "Opera Undressed" perfomances where you get a decent seat for (I think) £25 (sign up for email alerts to find out when these go on sale)

Also of course you could try the cinema broadcasts of Royal Opera or Metropolitan Opera performances to get an idea for what you like before going to a live performance.

I actually started with operas based on musicals - my first opera trip was La Boheme, because I wanted to see how it compared to Rent and fell in love with the experience. I also loved Aida and found that I liked Madame Butterfly a lot more than Miss Saigon because Cho-Cho-San's behaviour made a lot more sense than Kim's.

I'm still in the early stages of opera going though, so I'm trying to work my way through the Italian classics like Verdi, Puccini et al and survived my first Wagner. Personal highlight was a spontaneous visit to La Fenice during a trip to Venice.

If you love a "concept", come to Germany, directors all over the country are having field days with their Regietheater nonsense. I've yet to see an opera here in Cologne where people are dressed in period costumes. I've found my escape across the border in Belgium, where they do lovely sumptous productions with the entire male cast of Lucia di Lammermoor in kilts and furs recently

Look forward to hearing more advice and knowledge here too, since I'm still at the beginner's stage too.

Depends on her tastes of course, but what about Madame Butterfly or The Magic Flute? Both about to be on at the ENO - Magic Flute directed by Simon McBurney and Madame Butterfly is the Anthony Minghella production - you can find clips from both on youtube.

All good advice. I love opera, not everything (really never managed to get into The Magic Flute for instance) and I don't claim to be 'knowledgeable' but it's great to find something new that strikes a chord.

My vote for a 'first' would be La Boheme - utterly sublime music, easy to follow storyline...I've seen and own several versions and end up in tears every time. (My husband says in disbelief, "but you know how it ends...!") If you can get your hands on a copy of the 1993 Australian Opera version with David Hobson and Cheryl Barker, it will be a great introduction.

Jonanthan Miller's production of Cosi fan tutte is very funny, an extremely silly story but again, lovely music. If you want something a bit more dramatic, Tosca gets another recommendation. Again, easy to follow, great tunes, some of which you'll easily recognise.

Welsh National Opera regularly visit the Bristol Hippodrome, and Ellen Kent the Cheltenham Everyman, although I've never seen them so interested to see xanderl's comments!

Edit: I see that Russian State Ballet & Opera are at the Everyman next Friday & Sat with Madam Butterfly!

Not sure what age your children need to be to qualify for this but worth a look! Only ballet this season but I presume more will be announced soon

www.roh.org.uk/learning/families/welcome-performances/welcome-performances-whats-on

Eugene Onegin was my first opera and it's still my favourite to this day.

First opera at the ROH was Woyzeck - wouldn't recommend it as a starting point for absolute beginners though!

E lucevan le stelle and Una furtiva lagrima are beautiful. I love cara sposa also (check out one of Jaroussky's videos on youtube). And largo al factotum is fun (I like Simon Keenlyside's version, very funny).

Amphitheatre prices vary widely by production, you're right, parsley. I paid a little over £100 to see Bryn Terfel in Faust from there. But there are cheaper productions, and if you're not bothered by vertigo, there are usually plenty of cheap seats near the back even for otherwise expensive productions.

Marriage of Figaro/La Boheme/La Traviata as others have mentioned. One that I think works perfect dramatically and whose musical language isn't that modern, surely, is Peter Grimes by Britten.

Yes, those are arias, and beautiful ones.

What the operas are about: most operas are usually about super-intense emotionalism: sung-through musicals typically focusing on love and death, with love being set against a background of death to make it more rarified. Many people go to operas for the emotional release of crying, mostly to blub, but also to (internally) jump for joy and shout and carouse.

Even comedies, like "L'elisir d'amore" (in which a shyster sells a love potion to a dimwitted chap who aches for an unattainable girl), are filled with hyper intense emotionalism, which you have experienced in that aria on your playlist, "Una furtiva lagrima."

Some mistakenly think operas are for academics and elites, unrelatable and difficult to understand, but in fact, popular operas are a low brow primitive pleasure, designed to get emotional juices running by pitching emotionalism to the highest possible level, combining rousing music with rousing stories with rousing singing. This trailer for Carmen by ROH demonstrates the full low brow thrust of opera at it's most crowdpleasing:

The world wars threw suspicion on opera's low brow goals of stirring up the populace to fever pitches of emotion, especially because Wagner was a terrible racist, and opera abandoned populism for atonal experimentalism which basically knocked opera into a coma about the time Puccini died in 1924. Since then, opera has been trumped by musicals in it's populist romantic goals, and music writers who are capable of the extreme romanticism of Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti, Rossini, Bizet, Offenbach, Mozart and Wagner now write for musicals or movies. If John Williams had written music in 1900, he would have been the American Puccini, I think.

In it's current comatose state, the big opera houses, like ROH, rely on massive subsidies and horrendous ticket prices to keep the art form alive. The singers need a LOT of training, as tenors sing high notes (for males) with chest voices (rather than falsetto), and sopranos are asked to indulge in superhuman acts of the voice in order to hit those frenzied emotional places (see Mozart go Alexander McQueen bondage on the female voice here: .

But it is so worth keeping this art form alive, because at it's highest heights, it trumps everything in stirring the emotions of an audience. "La boheme" is a perfect intro to opera, as Puccini was the master of populism, nothing is as unashamedly melodic and emotional as Puccini, and La boheme is Puccini at his very best. "Madama Butterfly" is also a good starter for lovers of musicals as it is the original Miss Saigon, and "Un bel di vedremo" is a better tune than anything in Miss Saigon:

As you get into opera, you may find performers you fall in love with. Jonas Kaufman is probably the biggest draw in opera these days, as Pavarotti and Domingo were before him. Personally, I am very fond of Juan Diego Florez and Ermonela Jaho, of Joseph Calleja and Elina Garanca, of Bryan Hymel and Sonya Yoncheva, and despite his now shrunken voice, the sheer passion of Rolando Villazon is magnetic for me. Villazon in "Tales of Hoffman" is still one of my favourite opera memories, as in Juan Diego Florez singing to the brilliantly game and injured Joyce DiDonato in her wheelchair in "The Barber of Seville" (another excellent starter opera).

Have fun!