ABSTRACT
What is opera? For all that, or perhaps precisely because, it 'occupies a unique place in our traditional categorization of cultural objects into art and non-art, literature and non-literature, language and non-language' (Corse, 1987: 5), opera is by no means easy to define. Encyclopaedias and dictionaries designed for general readerships try to keep things simple. The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia states that opera is 'A staged drama for the most part sung, with instrumental accompaniment' (Hamilton, 1987: 260) while The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera tells us more elaborately that it is 'A drama meant to be sung with instrumental accompaniment by one or more singers in costume; recitative or spoken dialogue may separate set musical numbers' (Rosenthal and Warrack, 1980: 360). Apart from the bets hedged with phrases such as 'for the most part', 'meant' and 'may', neither clearly demarcates the generic boundaries between opera and other cognate art forms: masques, operetta, at times even ballets and oratorios but especially musicals — a situation compounded in some primer guides by indiscriminate or unqualified inclusion of musicals. Walsh (1995) for example, devotes more space in Who's Afraid of Opera? to Tim Rice's Chess than to Wagner's Der Ring des NibelungenA Some texts — again especially those aimed at more popular or introductory markets — don't even attempt a definition (Swanston 1978), while others, although differentiating between subgenres such as opera seria, semiseria, opera buffa, opera comique and operette, also leave a singular unifying definition to one side (Osborne 1983), sometimes explaining with exasperation why: 'It is impossible to write sensibly and analytically about "opera"... There are simply too many kinds of opera, performed in too many different
ways' (Littlejohn 1993: 15). It would appear that so diverse and complex is opera in the plural that a resignedly simple and not especially useful definition of 'the union of music and drama' type (Brook, 1947:11), is all that can embrace opera in the singular, except that, here too, the third key component — text or libretto — is left unspecified.
