Opera

While drawing attention to the deep aesthetic differences between the French and Italian opera in the late seventeenth century, and between the operas of Wagner, Verdi, Schoenberg, and Weill, Herbert Lindenberger judges that all these works have in common “the fact that they enact a play by means of instrumentally accompanied song” (Lindenberger 1998: 129). An opera, according to this conception, is a hybrid work that combines musical elements, in which singing predominates, with the representation of dramatic action. These are its components, which it shares with musicals and other types of music-theater. The components can be organized in a variety of ways, as when parts of the music lie outside the dramatic representation (e.g. in an independent overture or entr’acte), or when parts of the drama are unaccompanied by music (e.g. in short passages where a letter is read, or in whole stretches of spoken dialogue). Philosophical questions about opera are of two main kinds: ontological and aesthetic.