Opera house

This article is about the type of entertainment venue. For other uses, see Opera House (disambiguation).

The Teatro alla Scala in Milan, by night

An opera house is a theatre building used for opera performances that consists of a stage, an orchestra pit, audience seating, and backstage facilities for costumes and set building. While some venues are constructed specifically for operas, other opera houses are part of larger performing arts centers.

History

The first public opera house was the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice, Italy, which opened in 1637. Italy, where opera has been popular through the centuries among ordinary people as well as wealthy patrons, still has a large number of opera houses.^[1] When Henry Purcell was composing, there was no opera house in London. The first opera house in Germany was built in Hamburg in 1678. Early U.S. opera houses served a variety of functions in towns and cities, hosting community dances, fairs, plays, and vaudeville shows as well as operas and other musical events.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, opera houses were often financed by rulers, nobles, and wealthy people who used patronage of the arts to endorse their political ambitions and social positions or prestige. With the rise of bourgeois and capitalist social forms in the 19th century, European culture moved away from its patronage system to a publicly supported system. In the 2000s, most opera and theaters raise funds from a combination of government and institutional grants, ticket sales and, to a smaller extent, private donations.

Features

The Grand Theatre, Warsaw, ca. 1890

The Vienna Court Opera, ca. 1898

The Palais Garnier, Paris, a vertical section

Since many operas are large-scale productions, opera houses are usually large – generally more than 1,000 seats and often several thousand seats. Traditionally, Europe's major opera houses built in the 19th century contained between about 1,500 to 3,000 seats, examples being Brussels' La Monnaie (after renovations, with 1,700 seats), Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater (with 1,636), Warsaw's Grand Theatre (the main auditorium with 1,841), Paris' Opéra Garnier (with 2,200), the Royal Opera House in London (with 2,268) and the Vienna State Opera (the new auditorium with reduced capacity of 2,280). Modern opera houses of the twentieth century such as New York's Metropolitan Opera (with 3,800) and the San Francisco Opera (with 3,146) are larger. Many operas do not require large-scale productions and may be presented in smaller theaters, such as Venice's La Fenice with about 1,000 seats.

In a traditional opera house, the auditorium is U-shaped, with the length of the sides determining the audience capacity. Around this are tiers of balconies, and often, nearer the stage, are boxes (small partitioned sections of a balcony).

Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, opera houses generally have an orchestra pit, where a large number of orchestra players may be seated at a level below the audience, so that they can play without overwhelming the singing voices. This is especially true of Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus where the pit is almost completely covered.

The size of an opera orchestra varies, but for some operas, oratorios and other works, it may be very large; for some romantic period works (or for many of the operas of Richard Strauss), it can be well over 100 players. Similarly, an opera may have a large cast of characters, chorus, dancers and supernumeraries. Therefore, a major opera house will have extensive dressing room facilities. Opera houses often have on-premises set and costume building shops and facilities for storage of costumes, make-up, masks, and stage properties, and may also have rehearsal spaces.

Major opera houses throughout the world often have highly mechanized stages, with large stage elevators permitting heavy sets to be changed rapidly. At the Metropolitan Opera, for instance, sets are often changed during the action, as the audience watches, with singers rising or descending as they sing. This occurs in the Met's productions of operas such as Aida and Tales of Hoffman. London's Royal Opera House, which was remodeled in the late 1990s, retained the original 1858 auditorium at its core, but added completely new backstage and wing spaces in addition to an additional performance space and public areas. Much the same happened in the remodeling of Milan's La Scala opera house between 2002 and 2004.

Although stage, lighting and other production aspects of opera houses often make use of the latest technology, traditional opera houses have not used sound reinforcement systems with microphones and speakers to amplify the singers, since trained opera singers are normally able to project their unamplified voices in the hall. Since the 1990s, however, many opera houses have begun using a subtle form of sound reinforcement called acoustic enhancement (see below).

Often, operas are presented in their original languages, which may be different from the first language of the audience. For example, a Wagnerian opera presented in London may be in German. Therefore, modern opera houses may assist the audience by providing translated supertitles-- projections of the words over or near the stage. More recently, electronic libretto systems have begun to be used in some opera houses, including New York's Metropolitan Opera, Milan's La Scala and the Crosby Theatre of the Santa Fe Opera, which show the words on individual screens attached to the backs of the seats so as to not interfere with the visual aspects of the performance.

Acoustic enhancement with loudspeakers

A subtle type of sound reinforcement called acoustic enhancement is used in some opera houses. Acoustic enhancement systems help give a more even sound in the hall and prevent "dead spots" in the audience seating area by "...augment[ing] a hall's intrinsic acoustic characteristics." The systems use "...an array of microphones connected to a computer [which is] connected to an array of loudspeakers." However, as concertgoers have become aware of the use of these systems, debates have arisen, because "...purists maintain that the natural acoustic sound of [Classical] voices [or] instruments in a given hall should not be altered."^[2]

Kai Harada ^[3] states that opera houses have begun using electronic acoustic enhancement systems "...to compensate for flaws in a venue's acoustical architecture." Despite the uproar that has arisen amongst operagoers, Harada points out that none of the opera houses using acoustic enhancement systems "...use traditional, Broadway-style sound reinforcement, in which most if not all singers are equipped with radio microphones mixed to a series of unsightly loudspeakers scattered throughout the theatre." Instead, most opera houses use the sound reinforcement system for acoustic enhancement, and for subtle boosting of offstage voices, onstage dialogue, and sound effects (e.g., church bells in Tosca or thunder in Wagnerian operas).

One example of the use of this kind of enhancement is the New York State Theater used by the New York City Opera company.

See also

List of opera houses Theater Opera

List of concert halls List of buildings

Gallery:

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  New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, home of the New York City Opera

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  The Copenhagen Opera House in Denmark

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  Bolshoi Theatre

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  The Sydney Opera House is one of the world's most recognizable opera houses and landmarks

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  Auditorio de Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain)

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  The Palais Garnier, Paris, France

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  The Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater, Odessa, Ukraine

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  War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, USA

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  The Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, in Novosibirsk, is the biggest opera house in Russia

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  The Dresden Semperoper in Germany

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  The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York City

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  Oslo Opera House

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  The Berlin Staatsoper on Unter den Linden

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  Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City

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  The Alexandria Opera House in Alexandria, Egypt

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  Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain

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  Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires, Argentina

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  Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Italy

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  Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Italy

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  Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi in Trieste, Italy

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  Slovene National Opera and Ballet Theatre in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Notes

1. ^ BBC website
2. ^ Kai Harada, "Why do you need a Sound System?", 2005
3. ^ Kai Harada, Opera's Dirty Little Secret, Entertainment Design website, Mar 1, 2001

References

• Allison, John (ed.), Great Opera Houses of the World, supplement to Opera Magazine, London 2003
• Beauvert, Thierry, Opera Houses of the World, The Vendome Press, New York, 1995. ISBN 0-86565-978-8
• Beranek, Leo. Concert Halls and Opera Houses: Music, Acoustics, and Architecture, New York: Springer, 2004. ISBN 0-387-95524-0
• Hughes, Spike. Great Opera Houses; A Traveller's Guide to Their History and Traditions, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1956.
• Kaldor, Andras. Great Opera Houses (Masterpieces of Architecture) Antique Collectors Club, 2002. ISBN 1-85149-363-8
• Lynn, Karyl Charna, Opera: the Guide to Western Europe's Great Houses, Santa Fe, New Mexico: John Muir Publications, 1991. ISBN 0-945465-81-5
• Lynn, Karyl Charna, Italian Opera Houses and Festivals, Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2005. ISBN 0-8108-5359-0
• Plantamura, Carol, The Opera Lover's Guide to Europe, Citadel Press, 1996, ISBN 0-8065-1842-1

External links

• "The Layout of a Traditional Opera House" on h2g2
• "Great Opera Houses of the World" on h2g2
• Vintage postcard images of opera theaters from historicopera.com
• "History of Opera" on historyworld.net