Like film music, opera still tells you what it's about, but it's often in another language, has much more leeway for interpretation from its performers, and emphasizes the music itself over the plot.

Incidentally, opera's emphasis on the music speaking for itself is also what distinguishes it from musical theater— “in opera, music is the driving force; in musical theater, words come first,” writes New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini. The line has become increasingly blurred by great musical writing, but the distinction remains in the name itself: works that call themselves musical theater are saying they are theater first—musical—not music themselves.

Some of the most famous opera arias (songs, basically) forego words for long stretches, instead using just a single syllable, called coloratura. Here's the end of the Bell Song from Lakme, sung by coloratura soprano Sabine Deveilhe, imitating the orchestra's own bells.

I'm a bit embarrassed to say that for all my love and advocacy of classical music, there are two pillars of the repertoire that eluded me for most of my life: opera, and Mozart. I saw the Magic Flute when I was little, I'm told, but I don't remember it since I was asleep most of the time. I barely played any Mozart growing up—“You'll get Mozart in college,” Natalie told me—but I didn't.

Only after a concerted effort did I come to the realization—perhaps I always thought Mozart was boring because I didn't understand opera. In the last chapter, we used film music to discuss structure and timbre in music more generally—here we'll do the same with counterpoint and melody in opera.

Character and Counterpoint

The first number we'll dive into is the Papageno-Papagena duet from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), when the bumbling, bird-like bird-catcher Papageno finally finds his companion, Papagena. They flirt and debate whether they're going to have children together—little Papagenos (boys) or Papagenas (girls).

The words and acting make this very concrete music—we know exactly what's going on. The next couple renditions will be more abstract, highlighting how Mozart's music can communicate just as specifically as the words.

There are many delightful recordings of this—this one with Edward Jowle and Sofia Kirwan-Baez at the Royal College of Music is set in a university.

It may seem obvious, but it's worth explaining—when we talk about a passage in music having “character”, this is what we mean—the ability for a passage to embody a character so fully that we feel like we know the person it is representing. In this case there are actually multiple voices playing or singing simultaneously, a device called counterpoint.

A first experience of an opera should still be had with subtitles—but a subsequent listen will allow listeners to bask in this duet's charm—the effervescence of the strings and the vocal color simultaneously sincere and immature. Here is a rendition from a recording session—un-staged and un-subtitled, the libretto (the words) now just in our memory.

This music's ability to project character translates to a performance without subtitles—but it even works without singers completely.

Throughout this tour of classical music, there will be conversations between different voices over and over again. They may be literal voices from multiple singers, or they may be imitated voices on single piano —they're still called “voices” regardless. Music with multiple voices is called polyphonic music. Music with a single voice and accompaniment (like the Bell Song at the start of the chapter) is called homophonic music.

This next excerpt is from the same scene but performed by the Anderson & Roe duo on piano only. Without singers, the music is even more divorced from its concrete meaning. Not only can a single piano still tell the overall story, but the individual voices and their interplay (counterpoint) are also perfectly clear.

This was Anderson and Roe's own arrangement of The Magic Flute, but many of Mozart's own instrumental works—pieces titled Symphony and String Quartet and Piano Sonata which mean nothing except for identifying which instruments play them—are really operas in disguise. The characters in these pieces can be as vivid and accessible to listeners as they are when they're in costume.

For example, here's a sonata: “absolute” music, no story attached. But once you're aware of it, it's impossible not to hear the dialogue (counterpoint) between voices, and imagine the characters of the opera that Mozart has written here without actual voices. And as in the Papageno-Papagena duet, there are also instances where Mozart writes the orchestra part into the piece as well.

The videography here is also artistic in itself—highlighting the back and forth between instruments. Following contrapuntal lines can be hard for newer listeners to do unassisted, especially when the voices share the same timbre, and clever videography can act like a conductor pointing to a section of the orchestra to highlight a specific voice. In future chapters we'll look at much denser instrumental polyphony in the music of J.S. Bach.

Singing, Speaking, Dancing, and Imitating

As the music becomes more abstract, more and more questions are posed to the listener. A concerto for piano and orchestra doesn't just ask, “will Papageno and Papagena end up together in the end?”—it also asks what characters are involved in the first place, what are they saying, and even whether they are speaking or singing.

In Mozart's K. 271 Piano Concerto, Mozart pioneered what would become the modern concerto—a pianist like an opera singer, playing the protagonist, and sometimes other characters, by themself. One usually thinks of Mozart's most memorable moments as the soaring arias, but sometimes music actually speaks more than it sings. Something similar can be seen in the opening of the slow movement, played below by Elisabeth Brauss with Florian Donderer conducting.

In opera, there is a sort of minimally-accompanied singing-speaking hybrid called recitative (pronounced Italian with a “ch” sound). It is often used to advance plot, and allows great freedom to the singer. Recitative, like operatic dialogue, has also been copied in much instrumental music, like Ira Mowitz's solo cello Recitative.

In many concerti, there is also a moment called a cadenza when the orchestra cuts out and the soloist plays an extended solo based on the themes of the piece that historically would have been improvised. They are common fast movements where they are used to show off. In a slow movement like this, this gives our protagonist an opportunity for self-expression free from having to stay in time with the orchestra. This concerto's slow movement cadenza is often functions like recitative as well.

In the next and final third movement, full of dance and celebration, the soloist again takes over as in a cadenza. Here there is music that you could call speaking or singing—but moreso it dances, giving us a heartfelt minuet completely at odds with the surrounding material. The orchestra gradually joins the conversation. Even in this dance, I find that the music still embodies a specific character and asks the performers and listeners to supply the scene with their imagination.

This way of interpreting piano music as if it were imitating singers and orchestras, works for a surprising majority of the repertoire. As a pianist, I hated to admit this for a long time. Is our instrument just a poor man's orchestra? Historically, it was often literally this—when a composer wanted to hear or promote a piece before the days of electronic sampling, they often couldn't just get a whole orchestra together, so they would write an arrangement for piano. Even modern, difficult works, like Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, started out with a version for one piano four hands that's actually quite rewarding to play.

Endless Melody and The Total Work of Art

But you could ask the same question about instrumental music more generally. If instrumental music is mostly just imitating real characters, real life, why wouldn't we just listen to music with words and singers who act. Certainly there are many who would stop here, who would say that a total artwork that brings everything together is the best of all art. If you're German, you would probably call this a gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art.” And then you would likely point to Wagner, who pursued and promoted this ideal.

In an interesting twist, many of Wagner's highest achievements have been down-sampled and found homes in the repertoires of orchestras and pianists. Wagner's son-in-law, conductor Arturo Toscanini, was not a fan, saying “Wagner without drama is not Wagner.” Musicians would argue that instruments alone can provide plenty of drama.

The transfiguration at the end of Tristan und Isolde, known commonly as the Liebestod (“Love-death”), is one such moment. It is the final climax and resolution on four different planes. Most literally, we reach the Shakespearian ends of our star-crossed lovers (incidentally, the opera's opening theme was taken from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet). Romantically, Tristan and Isolde have been longing to be together physically and spiritually for the entire work, and finally, in death, they can be. Musically, we've had surges throughout the entire work, but they have never been allowed to reach their climax until now. And for the audience there's a sense of completion as well—we sit through five hours and three acts with only one major plot point per act, knowing what the first audiences did not—that finally, in the end, we would get to hear the transfiguration.

I think it's appropriate to follow the lead of orchestras and pianists here, and skip right to the transfiguration. Tristan has passed away, and Isolde, too, moves on from this world.

In the unbounded swell, in the resounding call, in the world's breath, flowing in all! To drown… to sink… unconscious… supreme bliss!

In Tristan, Wagner eschewed the influence of speaking in his writing, searching instead for endless melody. There are no breaks for recitative, and in moments like the transfiguration, there is a sense of “ever-flowing, continuously overlapping phrases” as critic Alex Ross puts it.

About Melody

What makes a melody? Technically, “melody” is just a sequence of notes one after another, contrasted with “harmony”, which is multiple notes at the same time—the horizontal dimension of a score rather as opposed to the vertical. But what distinguishes the melodies we love from any other series of notes?

To me, a meaningful melody is a journey to and/or from a climax. That is to say, it has a sense of direction, and if you were to look at the written notes moving up and down, you might see a “shape.” By default, the climax is the highest note in the passage, but not always, and musicians “shape” it that way. In “Happy Birthday”, the climax is the high note, the beginning of the third “birthday”. When you sing it, you naturally get louder when it gets higher and get quieter when it gets lower—this is a natural shape. Try to sing it the opposite way—getting softer as you get higher—and you might find it surprisingly difficult.

Most great melodies give us interesting shapes to catch our ear, leading us down twists and turns, but most importantly they give us a sense of direction that we are moving, without which we would start getting bored.

Here's a few measures of Una furtiva lagrima from Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore (“The Elixir of Love”), a more traditional melodic shape that mimics the patterns of speech. The peasant Nemorino notices a tear in his beloved Adina's eye, giving him hope that she may secretly return his feelings. The mostly descending melody captures the sadness, while the moments of upwards reach capture the longing.

The opening of Chopin's F Minor Ballade has a similar cadence—a gorgeous melody in the top voice that is equal parts speech and song—and incidentally, the subtle counterpoint of supporting voices underneath. Chopin was influenced by the Italian Bel Canto opera tradition, and this piece in particular has been explained as a number of very concrete stories. But I think it gains more by speaking directly to the more universal emotion involved rather than to a specific scene.

The opening cello solo from the Nocturne of Borodin's String Quartet has more vocal range and more contour, played here by the Bershears Quartet:

But a single descending scale from Tchaikovsky can be just as effective—the downwards line treated nobly rather than as a lamentation:

Even this simple series of bells by the piano in slow movement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata is a melody. In the Horowitz/Rostropovich audio-only recording especially there's an incredible transformation from simple rebeated bells into something that feels more like melody.

The pianist Jerome Lowenthal once told me a story about Claude Debussy, an innovator of musical “impressionism”. Someone proudly toasted him at a cocktail party, “to Debussy, the man who killed melody” as if it were an avant-garde badge of honor. Debussy looked miffed, and replied, “everything I write is melody.” The opening notes of his Cathedrale Engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral) could be seen as “nothing”, just an “effect” representing still, calm water—or they can be seen as melody with a shape (why not both?).

Copland says, “the creation of that continuity and flow—that long line—constitutes the be-all and end-all of every composer's existence.” In this sense, melody isn't just a “local” phenomenon that takes course over a few seconds, but also a global one, in which the entire work has an arc as well.

What instrumental music can't do

And yet for all of the ways that instrumental music can achieve the same effects as opera, it can't do everything. “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent,” said Victor Hugo. But when we want concrete specificity, there is sometimes no substitute for words, staging, and acting.

Opera excels at layering multiple perspectives simultaneously—like in the final trio of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, where three characters express their distinct emotional journeys in a single, interweaving musical moment. Opera can also create delicious dramatic irony, letting the audience share secrets with some characters while others remain in the dark. In the comic scene from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, we watch with delight as a suspicious husband searches his wife's room, unaware that hidden in her closet is Cherubino—a young male page who has been hastily dressed in women's clothing by the wife and her maid in an earlier attempt to avoid discovery.

But most of all there is a power in the connection to the humanity of the voice that is sometimes imitable but ultimately irreplaceable.

Julia Wolfe's Fire In My Mouth is about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire which killed 146 garment workers, mostly immigrant women and girls. This selection creates a visceral feeling of protest, where the audience feels directly entreated by the victims' voices. Protest art has been a fixture since the 20th century, at least since Picasso's “Guernica”. If effective, it gives the audience, too, a fire in their mouth.

This piece is an oratorio—essentially a semi-staged opera—that takes away some of the trappings of a fully staged work, but is still quite prescriptive in terms of setting or character. There is an entire world of choral music that we'll touch on in a future chapter about sacred music. But in this next section, we'll discuss songs for a single singer, typically completely unstaged and based on poetry more than plot.

What's in a song: Lieder and Song Cycles

Lied (plural lieder) is the German word for song, now often applied to non-German song. Songs—works that can be sung—constitute practically all of pop music, and are therefore the most familiar genre to the public. (As such, the public often calls any piece of music a “song” even if it can't be sung. This is a pet peeve of many a classical musician, who use “piece” to refer to non-vocal music.)

The genre of classical Lieder is the precursor of the modern pop song, and longer song cycles set the stage for modern albums.

Here's the inventor of the song genre, Franz Schubert, who set Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) to the harrowing text of Goethe's Faust. Gretchen sits at her spinning wheel, and sings about Faust: “I have lost my peace of mind, / my heart is heavy, / I will never find it, / Nevermore.” This performance is from Renee Fleming—“just” a song, but with a complete narrative and emotional story arc in just a couple minutes. The English subtitles are below the German.

When digging into a piece of programmatic music like this, the title (Gretchen and the Spinning Wheel) is a good place to start. There are two elements here, Gretchen, who is obviously the singer, and the spinning wheel which must be the piano.

In Gretchen am Spinnrade, the pianist plays Gretchen's spinning wheel. But it's not just a spinning wheel, it's also the emotional core, to such an extent that pianists often play Liszt's transcription for piano alone, in which we get the despair and terror in their pure form outside of a concrete story.

In Schubert's era, most songs were set to poetry, not lyrics written by the composer. But the symbolism of the spinning wheel is an additional layer of interpretation that Schubert adds to Goethe's text. I suppose it's possible that in the poem, the spinning wheel is a metaphor for the speaker's inner turmoil, spiraling and aching and trapped in a loop. But it is really Schubert and the pianist that converts it into something that is present and alive—that cuts out only at the singer's scream of “his kiss”—the climax marked as much by the cessation of motion as by the energy of its output—and sputters to get going again afterwards. Meanwhile the pulsing underneath the wheel is barely audible: that pulse is the pedal that powers the wheel, yes, but also the singer's heartbeat, and maybe the listener's too.

Pianists love to play Schubert's lieder because they form an equal duo with the singer. Many of the piano parts are onomatopoeic, used in songs both light and heavy, in turns representing:

• The rippling stream with a darting trout in "Die Forelle"—with popular variations for piano solo, piano quintet, and washing machine.
• The relentless galloping horse carrying father and dying child in "Erlkönig"—with popular solo versions for piano and violin.
• The creaking branches of "Der Lindenbaum" (The Linden Tree). (Yes, traditional German lieder tends to have common themes)
• The steady drone of a Hurdy-Gurdy in "Der Leiermann" (The Hurdy-gurdy Man)
• The post horn echoes in "Die Post"
• The rocking cradle in the fragile "Wiegenlied" (Lullaby)
• The swaying waves of "Auf dem Wasser zu singen" (To be sung on the water)

It didn't take long for composers to look at Schubert's model and think, “I can achieve so much of what a song achieves even without lyrics.” And so siblings Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn) developed a new genre of piano pieces in this style—Felix with his Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words) and Fanny with her Lied für Klavier (Songs for Piano). These pieces rarely have descriptive titles, and when they do, they tend to be simple and direct, like Felix's "Duetto" (Duet), a contrapuntal two-voice love song written for his future wife, Cécile.

But once you start looking through this lens of music-as-song, you also see this song-like sensibility emerge in music not called “songs” at all. Take, for instance, the first theme of the Mendelssohn Fantasie. There is a legend that Mendelssohn heard it sung by a Scottish innkeeper. Still, the piece was not written to tell a story the way Schubert set Goethe to music, but it would not be hard to imagine one.

Even in the finale's virtuosic fireworks, there is never a moment without storytelling, even if the melody often lacks the singability of the first movement's opening theme.

There is a trick that music teachers love, that listeners, too, can benefit from: adding lyrics to music. As a student, I would always come up with something banal like “I love you” or “I hate you”—but the possibilities are endless. How would one even approach the Badinerie of Bach, which whirls and dances much like the Mendelssohn finale. It is played here by Hannah Schlubeck on Panflute:

Incredibly catchy melody, and clearly full of character, but is it really possible to go from that to a specific set of lyrics? With a seeming natural ease, here are words from Achinoam Nini. An “I love you” with quite a bit more pizzazz:

There's a great meta lyric in there that captures this approach to music and life—“Life's a song that we are playing… you can change it but it's never really wrong.”

This gets us closer and closer to crossing the barrier into modern day pop songs. The last example is from Caroline Shaw. Like Schubert, there is a lot of literal representation of the words in this song, too—there's a diminuendo (decreasing volume) during the line “fade to stanzas of the dust”, and the strings pizzicato (pluck) like a ticking clock “keeping track of time.” It is still in the classical tradition, a score written out for others to interpret, although in this recording she is the one singing with the Attacca String Quartet, and some of the writing feels familiar to Broadway or folk songs.

Just as putting classical music together with film can give us new interpretations of the music, so too can setting poetry to music give us new interpretations of the poetry. Those of us not inclined to read poetry closely might find it much easier to hear the repetition of Gertrude Stein's saying, “a rose is a rose is a rose…” setting up the unexpected change at the end of each phrase.

And despite there being words and music in this song, there is still plenty of room for interpretation on top of it. One music video draws parallels between “borrowed time” and climate change, a comparison that many listeners might pass over entirely.

In the next chapter we will go further abstract and remove the words from the music entirely, and gain another way to interpret music: through dance. And in fact, we will pick up the story of the rose with another of Shaw's lyrical inspirations, as Juliet stands on her balcony grappling with the nature of identity: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

The Rabbit Hole—Going to the Opera

It is difficult for a first listen to drop into a single aria on YouTube presented without context or subtitles, though not impossible, as in this clip from Sabine Devieilhe (the soprano we started the chapter with), which is beautiful just by itself.

With regards to complete operas, we are limited in our listening by what our local opera companies are performing. Complete, subtitled operas are available from sources like The Met and Medici.tv with a paid subscription and enough patience and attention span to watch a 3+ hour production on their screen. For newer listeners, I highly recommend watching with subtitles for the first listen.

When choosing a live performance to see, I would not shy away from contemporary opera, which often address more modern themes and tensions and falls under the 3 hour mark that much of the standard repertory takes. Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, based on the book of the same name, tells the story of an inmate on death row. Missy Mazzoli's The Listeners, a modern psychological thriller about cults, is set in a U.S. suburb and takes under two hours. Saariaho's multi-lingual Innocence revolves around a school shooting and takes a compact hour and a half. Of course, the old stories continue to fascinate, as in Degun's reworking of Monteverdi's Orfeo, in which Indian classical music meets the western baroque in the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The Italian and German “greatest hits” by Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Bellini, Wagner, Strauss, and others—alongside the French classics of Bizet, Berlioz, etc.—are perennially programmed and have earned their place in history. Verdi was so famous that letters addressed simply to 'Maestro Verdi, Italy' would reliably reach him. Alongside their serious works, the more comic works (opere buffe) of these masters can offer easier “watchability.”

A middleground between a modern dramatic sensibility and a more approachable musical language can be found in the Eastern European works of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Dvořák, Janáček, Shostakovich, and the English languages works of Britten and Gershwin. Newer listeners don't typically seek these works out, and opera companies tend not to produce or promote them as much, but I suspect that their emotional immediacy might make them more successful than the institutions expect.

One such work is Janáček's harrowing opera, Jenůfa. Pregnant and unmarried, Jenůfa had been hidden away by her stepmother Kostelnička after her baby's father Števa refused to marry her. Then, driven by shame and fear that no man would marry Jenůfa with an illegitimate child, Kostelnička reveals that she will drown the infant to secure Jenůfa's prospects in an aria that still gives me chills.

When Jenůfa awakens from a drugged sleep, she doesn't yet know her baby's fate and begins to pray for his well-being. Still believing her child is alive but ill, she turns to the Virgin Mary in a moment of maternal concern and spiritual devotion. Her prayer is all the more heartbreaking because the audience knows what Jenůfa does not—that her child is already dead. (The full scene is available without subtitles here)

One final note—before you go to the opera, make sure your expectations are set properly—check the runtime and number of intermissions, and know that opera singers don't use microphones indoors, so they will not sound amplified like in recordings and musicals.

The Rabbit Hole—Vocal Music

Lieder is much shorter and listenable in small doses or on recordings, and so it should be easier to recommend specific songs for listening. Beyond the shorter, one-off songs, like Schumann's love song, Widmung (Piano transcription with lyrics here), there are the longer narrative song cycles of Schubert,Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin, Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe, Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer, and the works of Hugo Wolf, who followed in Schubert's footsteps. But it is unfortunate how few official videos on YouTube have captions, so you may have to find the translations elsewhere so you can follow along, as listeners did in the pre-internet days. Of the many notable songs written after Schubert, the autumnal, ruminative, and slowly unfolding Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss, sung by Jessye Norman, hold a special place in recorded legacy—a work that Norman “owns” in the way Jacqueline Du Pre owns the Elgar Cello Concerto.

Alongside German lieder there are rich traditions of French melodie, Russian romance, and classical songs in practically in every language, for every arrangement of voices. Leilehua Lanzilotti's On Stochastic Wave Behavior, a work where indigenous knowledge meets modern science, is sung in the native language of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. Kaija Saariaho's futuristic-sounding Lonh for voice and electronics contains text in three languages—Occitan, French, and English—about love from afar.

In English, I'd first point listeners to the songs of Benjamin Britten, both secular and religious, which are moving regardless of the listener's beliefs. His Canticle II, for instance, tells the story of Abraham and Isaac as told by the text of the Chester Mystery Plays. It was written for a tenor and alto who play the roles of the father and the son, and when they sing together at the opening, they form the voice of God.

From the contemporary works of more narrative scope and larger ensembles, I'd recommend David Lang's Little Match Girl Passion for singers who also play percussion, which tells Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale. Choral works are generally beyond the scope of both this book and my knowledge, but I will point out that modern settings of poems, like Eric Whitacre's All Seems Beautiful To Me from Walt Whitman extend the classical choral repertoire beyond the sacred (religious) music that it has been known for since before Saint Hildegard von Bingen in the Middle Ages. Spiritual works will get a fuller treatment in a future chapter.

But in the next chapter we take abstraction to the next step and remove the words from songs completely.