Even if you aren’t a fan of opera or classical music, unless you have been living as a jungle hermit hiding out in Tibet or some even more isolated place, you surely have heard quite a few catchy opera music before. Ever been curious about the origin of that hooky tune you hear that keeps you replaying a certain TV commercials or film clip in your head over and over again? I bet you’d recognize at least a few of the numbers listed here: (click on the song title to hear Youtube clip)
1. Lakmé: Flower Duet (Dome épais)
From Leo Delibes’ exotic opera about an Indian princess Lakmé and her mezzo-soprano slave Mallika, who find their own garden environs so enchantingly beautiful that they break into song… or, rather, an enchantingly flowery duet in praise of it. It is such an exquisitely soothingly blissful music that car commercials love to use it as background theme to suggest the smooth driving experience. I don’t know how the cars usually live up to the suggestion, but the music has unquestionably stood the test of time.
2. Die Walküre (The Valkyrie): Ride of the Valkyries
This rousing war cry of the Valkyries, the goddesses of Norse mythology, is most often associated with the apocalyptical ‘Helicopter Fleet Scene’ from the film ‘Apocalypse Now‘, though it also shows up in many other war films and commercials. It is, aside from the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, perhaps the best known piece of music by Richard Wagner. Listen to the thing and you can almost see the carcass-grabbing daughters of Wotan streaking across the sky (in the form of the aurora borealis) on their way to another feasting at the battle field.
3. La Forza del destino (The Force of Destiny) : Overture
From Giuseppe Verdi’s very complicatedly tragic opera (only one of the principal characters survives to the end). It is full of leitmotifs from the opera proper, with the opening cords aptly miming fate knocking on. This moody overture is a favorite of TV commercials… currently it is the running theme to Stella Artois beer commercials. Frankly, I don’t know why this overture would be so attractive to happy commercials… it’s musical subtext makes it quite clear that the opera would end in a turbulent and deadly storm, I think.
4. Andre Chénier: La mamma morte
To tell the truth, there are many opera fans who aren’t familiar with this dramatically devastating piece from Umberto Giodarno’s one-hit-wonder opera either. Most of you will have first experienced it in the soul scorching scene in the film Philadelphia when Tom Hanks’ character, the AIDS patient Andy Beckett explains the aria Maddalene sings in recounting the fiery death of her mother as his lawyer (played by Denzel Washington) listens and finds that there is more soul left in his litigious self than he realized. The clip, as in the film, is a version sung by the dramatically devastating Maria Callas.
5. Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville): Overture
Various bits of this long and totally awesome instrumental lead in to Gioachino Rossini’s most popular comic opera keep appearing in various TV commercials. You might even be surprised that the different bits are from the same musical number… To tell the truth, the opera proper isn’t nearly as wonderfully ‘tight’ as this overture is. It has a solo part for most of the major orchestral instruments and keeps building in a magnificent Rossinian crescendo that really opens the curtain with a bang.
6. Il Barbiere di Siviglia: Largo al factotum
Figaro… This tune shows up a lot in commercials, and some might remember hearing it from Babe: Pig In The City, also. Figaro is, of course, the title role of the opera, the know-it-all and know-everyone-worth-knowing barber of Seville, who really spends a lot more time at match-making rather than cutting the hair of the other characters in the story. Listening to this comical spit-fire of an aria and one doesn’t wonder how this suave hair-stylist can talk his way out of any jam. It isn’t so much of what he talks about as how many words he actually spits out each second, really.
7. Lohengrin: Wedding March
Many of you have walked down the aisle on that last day of your solitary life to this fabulous Bridal March from Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. It is an old fashioned German (sober) pomp song from an old fashioned German opera that nearly every American can hum to… in English as ‘Here comes the bride!’
8. La Wally: Ebben? ne andro lontana
Young and beautiful Wally chastises her father for trying to impose a marriage on her, before running off with the boy she actually loves. The voice of Maria Callas may be an acquired taste to many, but her interpretation is peerless… Listening to the final bars of this rendition, there can’t be any doubt that this Wally really intends never to return to see her parents again! The opera by Alfredo Catalani is hardly ever performed now, but the aria is still a favorite recital number for lyric soprano. I actually first heard this aria when I listened to Sarah Brightman, the cross-over English singer, CD…. where I fell in love with the London Philharmonie. Listening to it done by actual opera singers, though, you’ll hear why it takes so much time and study for a singer to actually do songs like this justice. The drama is actually carried in the voice itself in ways that the orchestra can’t imitate.
9. Cosi fan tutte: Soave sia il vento
“Gentle be the breeze, and calm be the waves. Let all elements bend to their wishes!”… is the farewell wish the sisters; Fiordiligi (soprano) and Dorabella (mezzo-soprano) sing as they send their fiances off to war…. not knowing that the boys and Don Alfonso (bass) are scheming to put their fidelity to a test. It is a magnificent sea-scape of a trio written by Wolfgang Mozart at his most inspired (and he was inspired quite a lot). If this number doesn’t put a vivid image of the seaside in your head, then you don’t know what a seaside is like!
10. Legend of Tsar Saltan: Flight of the Bumble Bee
Ha! Did you really know that this buzzingly wonderful sonic painting of a bumbling bee is actually a tableau from a Russian opera? Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov was really a prolific opera composer, though his works aren’t staged much outside of Russia nowadays. This strings dominated piece occurs in Act III, depicting the transformation of Tsarevitch Gvidon into a bumble bee by the Swan-Bird, to aid his travel. Its’ transcription is a favorite of virtuoso pianist or violinist, as famously captured in the film Shine (where David Helfgott plays the piano version of it at a restaurant toward the end).
11. Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro): Voi che sapete
This lovely little serenade by Cherubino the romantically robust young page to the Countess Almaviva is, somehow, more associated with the HBO mob series The Sopranos these days. I think they are going for the irony… One can hardly think of a more un-gangster-ish music than this beautiful horn-accompanied song by Mozart!
12. La Traviata: Libiamo ne lieti calici (Brindisi)
Talk about how to deliver an after-dinner toast in style! This is the toast young Alfredo offers to Violetta, the strikingly thin (she’s dying of consumption, see?) and beautiful courtesan at her dinner party. Truly, not many knows the meaning of why it is good to ‘live life to the fullest while you have it’ as Verdi did. The lady of this opera spends the entire show wasting away in a most musically glamorous manner. Pop the champagne and drink with her the next time you hear this on the air-wave.
13. Nabucco: Va pensiero
Also known as the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, this chorus from Verdi’s first successful opera is practically the second national anthem of Italy. You even heard it sung at the opening and closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Turin. When the opera was premiered, Italy was still struggling for independence from the Austrian Empire, and this patriotic song so struck a chord with his countrymen that Verdi became a national hero for it. It is a strikingly simple tune that speaks directly to everyone’s sense of pride and identity… no matter what nationality you are!
14. Guillaume Tell (William Tell): Overture
If you’re an American, then surely you are familiar with this instrumental opening to Rossini’s grandest (and final) opera, William Tell, from the hit TV series, The Lone Ranger. It is a long and ambitious orchestral prelude to a very long and very ambitious grand opera by the bel canto composer. The ‘Lone Ranger’ part comes toward the end of it.
15. Carmen: Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre (Toreador Song)
In Seville, Spain, during Carmen’s time, there was no cooler dude in town than Escamillo, the very studly bull-fighter…. And he knows it! Some women would find that unbearably stuffy for a lover, but many have their brain melted by the sheer bombastic potency of his …er… charisma… and finds him practically irresistible. Figure skaters also tend to find this song addictive… and so do films and commercials set with Spanish backdrop.
16. La Bohème: Quando m’en vo (Musetta’s Waltz)
This lovely soprano aria is one of the recurring themes in the hit film ‘Moonstruck’, though I think the film only uses the instrumental version of it. Musetta is a tease of a woman, and sings this teasy romantic song to the helpless Marcello… Actually, one doesn’t even have to understand Italian to be as helpless as Marcello is listening to this thing, especially when sung by a siren like Anna Netrebko!
17. Les contes d’Hoffmann (Tales of Hoffmann): Belle nuit (Barcarolle)
Giulietta and Niklausse (actually the Muse in disguise) are out on the Venetian Grand Canal singing a marvelous duet while smelling love in the beautiful Italian night. I don’t know why, but somehow in opera the mezzo-soprano and the soprano are assigned a lot of love-duets like this… Somehow the blend of these voices just work! Listen for it during romantic scene in films.
18. Lucia di Lammermoor: Chi mi frena (The Sextet)
Somehow this most sublimely beautiful of operatic six-somes is always showing up in extremely violent films (The Untouchables, the Departed, etc). Romantically distressed Lucia is tricked by her brother, Enrico, into marrying a man she doesn’t love (Arturo). Her consent (however reluctant it is) is very publicly denounced by her true love, Edgardo, who returns from abroad just in time to ensure the unhappy state of Lucia’s pending wedding.
19. Rigoletto: La donna è mobile
The Duke of Mantua finds women finicky and untrustworthy as lovers… and says so in this aria. It is a testament to Verdi, the opera’s composer, that such a whiny excuse for not getting the girl is worth so much re-listening to!
20. Rinaldo: Lascia ch’io pianga
Known mostly from the film Farinelli: Il Castrato and on cross-over divas’ CDs, this mournful song is sung by Almirena (a female character) as she laments her separation from her beloved knight Rinaldo (the title character of Handel’s fantasy opera).
So there you have it. You do know more about opera music than you thought you did after all!! If any of these clips capture your imagination, why not check out the opera house in your area to see if any of the opera listed here is on the schedule?
Reference:
- www.epinions.com/content_5175550084 (A Few Words To Opera Newbies)
