The 25 Best Operas – Part 1

This list grew to such length that I decided to split it into two parts. The first 12 operas discussed are here. The remaining 13 will be in the next post.

A few disclaimers before I start my list. This sort of compendium is just for fun. There can be no definitive list of the 25 best or greatest operas. The BBC made a similar list that didn’t include Carmen. So my competition is not sterling. Such an effort is always subjective and sure to generate a lot of disagreement. If I made these picks on a different day, they would likely be different. So feel free to disagree and to hurl abuse at my enumeration, as long as you stay within the bounds of decency. Calling me an idiot is OK, but stronger insults are best left unwrtitten.

It was hard enough to limit myself to 25 operas; ranking them is even harder. So they’re presented by the date of their first performance, using my principle that there is no order among great masterpieces. You’ll notice that there is no opera listed before Mozart. That’s because I don’t care that much for them and because opera from Mozart on is a different beast from what it was before him.

The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart, 1786) is often considered to be the best opera ever written. Its strengths are the dazzlingly intricate writing by Mozart and Da Ponte’s great libretto. Its weakness is its length. It’s just too long. I don’t know what I’d cut. Only Mozart could have done it, and he should have. Its characters are interesting and exceptionally well delineated. The opera is amusing and excellent in every way save a superfluity of mirth. There are smiles, but no belly laughs.

George Bernard Shaw thought Don Giovanni (Mozart, 1787) the greatest work of art in the entire Western canon. The title character has been put through every interpretive wringer ever wrought. Leporello says his master has had more than 2,000 conquests. Freud said that a man who couldn’t find what he was looking for in 1,000 women was looking for a man. Interestingly, the Don has no success with any of the women he encounters during the opera. The opera has great parts for all six of its characters. The tenor, Don Ottavio, opera’s biggest nebbish, has two outstanding arias.

The Barber of Seville (Rossini, 1816) is to opera what the Marx Brothers’ Paramount movies are to films. Its madcap humor and sparkling music make it the greatest opera buffa ever written. Its composer was all of 23 years old when he wrote the work. It’s almost impossible to go wrong with this piece. It’s so well constructed that even a great director can’t ruin it.

Macbeth (Verdi, 1847) was successful in its initial appearances. In 1865, he revised the opera for a Paris production. His then regular librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, did the revision in Italian which was then translated into French. After a few performances, it disappeared from the repertory. It returned after World War II. It did not reach the Met until 1959. I was at the Met’s first performance of Verdi’s first Shakespearean opera. The great Verdi baritone Leonard Warren had a triumph in the title role. Since then it has regularly appeared at the Met and all over the rest of the operatic world. It is the masterpiece of Verdi’s pre-Rigoletto operas.

Rigoletto (Verdi, 1851) was set to a libretto by Piave based on Victor Hugo’s five-act play Le roi s’amuse. Hugo’s play was banned after just one performance. Verdi was prevented by the censors from depicting a licentious King (Francis I) onstage and had to substitute a Duke in his place. Verdi knew ‘La donna è mobile’ would be an instant hit and didn’t give the tenor the music until just before the premiere. The next day after the successful first performance everyone in Venice was singing the tune.

Victor Hugo resented his play, which had been banned in France, being transformed into an Italian opera and considered it plagiarism (there were no copyright restrictions against this at the time). When Hugo attended a performance of the opera in Paris, however, he marveled at the way Verdi’s music in the quartet allowed the emotions of the four different characters to be heard together and yet distinguished clearly from each other at the same time and wished that he could achieve such an effect in a spoken drama.

Julian Budden regards the opera as “revolutionary”, just as Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was: “the barriers between formal melody and recitative are down as never before.” He continued, “Just after 1850 at the age of 38, Verdi closed the door on a period of Italian opera with Rigoletto. The so-called Ottocento in music is finished [not quite true, see Il Trovatore below]. Verdi will continue to draw on certain of its forms for the next few operas, but in a totally new spirit.”

The story of the deformed court jester who is undone by his only virtue, his love for his daughter, remains one of opera’s greatest accomplishments. Stravinsky wrote, “I say that in the aria ‘La donna è mobile’, for example, which the elite thinks only brilliant and superficial, there is more substance and feeling than in the whole of Wagner’s Ring cycle.”

Il Trovatore (Verdi, 1853) was written concurrently with La Traviata. The composer created two operas that couldn’t be more different. Trovatore is about the triumph of the id. Traviata is about self sacrifice. Everyone in Trovatore is crazy; the gypsy Azucena is the craziest of all. It’s no coincidence that Trovatore is the opera performed in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. All four characters are possessed by desire which overcomes reason.

This is the opera where the gypsy throws the wrong baby into the flames burning her mother alive – maybe. She’s so demented that we can’t be sure which baby was tossed. The soprano drinks poison rather than submit to the baritone. All the craziness is set to the most inspired music ever put to paper. The melodies are endless. This is the last bel canto opera ever written. It’s bel canto with a core of steel, however. Verdi would never return to this format. Caruso famously remarked that all you needed to perform Trovatore were the four greatest singers in the world.

La Traviata (Verdi, 1853), on the other hand, is an intimate depiction of a ‘Traviata’ (A woman who has gone astray – there’s no exact English equivalent of the word). She finds true love and gives it up for the well-being of a family she hasn’t met. The opera is completely about the title character, and its focus on one person is unique in Verdi’s oeuvre. It was a fiasco at its first performance. Verdi wrote his only pupil and later his friend Emanuele Muzio, “La traviata last night a failure. Was the fault mine or the singers’? Time will tell.” It has. Traviata is now the most performed opera in the world.

Die Walküre (Wagner, completed 1856) is the second of the four Ring operas. It is also the most performed. The reason is simple; it has the best and most appealing music of the four. From the great duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act to the Ride of the Valkyries to the Magic Fire Music and Wotan’s farewell, the opera is filled with music of great beauty. But it only works with singers of the first rank and a superior conductor.

Un Ballo in Maschera (Verdi, 1859) is a very popular opera that nevertheless doesn’t get all the respect that it merits. It has a compelling story, great music for a dramatic soprano, a high soprano, a contralto, a baritone who sings one of Verdi’s greatest arias, and especially the tenor. It has one of the most glorious love duets in opera. All these, combined with a sinister plot leavened with macabre humor make it a perfect opera.

Don Carlo (Verdi, 1867) was written to a French libretto for the Paris Opera. In its first language, it’s Don Carlos, but the Italian translation is more frequently performed. The opera is on the grandest of scales. It involves frustrated love, politics, the conflict between church and state, and friendship versus duty. The scene in the King’s apartment, in which everybody save the title character appears, is arguably the greatest single act in all opera. The scale of the work is alternately vast and intimate. Verdi took the French Grand Opera style popularized by Meyerbeer to celestial heights.

Verdi revised the opera so many times and in so many different forms without declaring which version was definitive that you can see it performed a half dozen times without seeing and hearing the same words and music in the same order. Regardless, it is a great masterwork.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Wagner, 1867) is Wagner’s only comedy among his mature works. There aren’t very many laughs over its more than five-hour run time, but there is a lot of glorious music. The overture is one of the best. The riot that ends Act 2 is inspired. The great quintet in Act III, Scene 4, is perhaps the most beautiful music the composer ever wrote. The tenor’s Preislied is a great aria.

The opera’s downsides are its extreme length, a villain who’s nasty rather than amusing, and a call for the purification of the arts by Hans Sachs in the opera’s last scene. The “cleansing” aspects of the finale have resulted in the opera being viewed as a “problem” work. Beckmesser, the villain, is often seen as an antisemitic caricature. Regardless of this view, he is a villain typical of German composers, not named Mozart. They seem unable to write comic villains with at least a modicum of charm. Beckmesser is a hopeless jerk. See Baron Ochs in the next post for another German comic villain without any redeeming features. The Italian composers excelled at creating comic characters with bad traits combined with endearing ones.

Boris Godunov (Mussorgsky, 1869) was the composer’s first opera. The Russian-language libretto was written by the composer, and is based on the 1825 drama Boris Godunov by Aleksandr Pushkin, and, in the Revised Version of 1872, on Nikolay Karamzin’s History of the Russian State. Several composers, chief among them Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich, have created new editions of the opera to “correct” perceived technical weaknesses in the composer’s original scores. Today, however, almost all performances of the opera use Mussorgsky’s original score.

The title role, along with Verdi’s Philip II from Don Carlo, are the two greatest bass roles in the genre. Boris’s ascension to power illicitly obtained, and his subsequent moral decline into madness and death is unique in opera.

Continued in next post.