Opera Guide | Song of the Earth

OF THE EARTH (DAS LIED VON DER ERDE)

SONG

AN OPERA GUIDE

BOSTONLYRICOPERA

Dear Opera Curious and Opera Lovers alike,

March 10, 2026

Boston Lyric Opera is thrilled to welcome you to the newly renovated Opera + Community Studios for our production of one of Mahler’s last works – a meditation on nature, longing, and farewell: Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde).

Opera has a way of tapping into big emotions in a way that’s hard to describe. There’s something incredibly powerful about experiencing the human voice live in the theater, and I believe that whether you’re new to opera or have loved it for years, there’s always something new to discover. To help make your experience even richer, we’ve put together this Guide. It’s designed to give you a little background on Song of the Earth, its themes, and how these themes resonate today and throughout this production. By providing historical and contemporary context, along with tools to thoughtfully reflect on the performance before or after you attend, we hope to make your experience a memorable one.

Boston Lyric Opera inspires, entertains, and connects communities through compelling performances, programs, and gatherings. Our vision is to create operatic moments that enrich everyday life. As we develop additional Guides, we’re always eager to hear how we can improve your experience. Please tell us about how you use this Guide and how it can best serve your future learning and engagement needs by emailing education@blo.org

If you’re interested in engaging with us further and learning about additional opera education opportunities with Boston Lyric Opera, please visit blo.org/youth-and-schools to discover our programs and initiatives. We can’t wait to share this experience with you.

Warmly,

Nina Yoshida Nelsen Artistic Director

Boston Lyric Opera

SONG OF THE EARTH SYNOPSIS

By Morgan Beckford

Song of the Earth begins with The Poet, The Lover, and The Mother entering a room together. Although they occupy the same physical space – a single room – their experiences take place in different timelines.

The Mother sits up abruptly and speaks, attempting to get dressed and start her day; but by the end of her speech, she takes her robe off and returns to bed.

The Poet begins to sing “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” (“The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow”). He sits at his table to write but struggles to do so. Crumpling his papers and throwing them to the floor, he begins drinking instead. He stands but is unsteady on his feet. As he fills his glass again, The Lover moves toward The Poet. She takes the glass out of his hand and embraces him. He shakes her off. As The Lover walks to the window, The Poet sits down to resume his writing, while The Mother tosses and turns in bed.

For a second time, The Mother tries to get ready for her day. She dresses and starts walking toward the window, while The Lover moves toward the bed and sits. While The Mother speaks, The Poet continues to write, periodically tossing papers onto the floor. The Lover walks around the room as she sings “Der Einsame im Herbst” (“The Lonely One in Autumn”). She touches The Poet, who doesn’t respond – he keeps writing. The Lover moves back toward the window, while The Mother sits down on the bed. She turns toward the audience and speaks about the strangeness of life.

The Poet’s writing leads him into a memory of a party with his friends. He begins to show off and dance, becoming more animated as he sings “Von der Jugend” (“Of Youth”). The Lover turns away from the window to watch him and walks toward The Mother, joining her on the bed. The Poet continues to dance, and approaching The Lover, pulls her up from the bed to join him. After a short time, he spins her back to the bed and returns to his desk.

The Mother begins to share memories of her child, trying to make the bed, as The Lover joins her. As she continues, The Poet crosses toward the window, and The Mother moves toward the desk. The Lover begins to sing “Von der

Schönheit” (“Of Beauty.”) As The Lover rises from the bed, The Poet and The Mother move toward it and get in, each one inhabiting it as if alone. Eventually The Lover joins them, and all three toss and turn under the covers. After some time, The Lover stands up on the bed and sings, while The Poet and The Mother try to pull her back under the covers. The Lover shakes off their attempts. The Poet and The Mother wrap themselves around The Lover for a final embrace before getting out of the bed and returning to their original positions in the room.

From the bed, The Mother speaks of her daughter, while The Poet writes continuously, crumpling more papers and throwing them onto the floor. As he begins to sing “Der Trunkene im Frühling” (“The Drunkard in Spring”), The Poet stands and moves around the room with an increasing sense of restlessness. He gathers the papers he has discarded, and in a final bout of frustration, throws them around the room, storming back to his chair when the song is done. The Mother sits up in bed to once again attempt to start her day. She describes the loss of her child, concluding that she needs to keep living.

As The Lover begins to sing “Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”), she moves around the room, discovering the papers that have been discarded. She begins to read, and as she continues, The Mother opens a chest and takes out old papers, yellowed with time. The Lover and The Mother sit together on the chest, reading, until The Mother gets up to go to sleep in the bed, taking some of the pages with her.

The Poet stands, lost in his memories, and begins to move around the room. He alone hears and responds to sights and sounds the audience cannot see. Eventually, he crosses toward the window and moves through it, leaving the room behind. He appears on the outside of the window, renewed with new strength and joy, leaving The Lover and The Mother inside. The Mother puts flowers in a vase on the table, while The Lover reads an armful of papers. The Mother, returning to the bed, reads the yellowed pages from the chest with joy. She laughs, while The Lover continues to sing. Ultimately, the Lover – inspired by the writing before her – takes over the role of Poet and begins to write her own words, her imagination fired anew.

Porcelain Pavilions and Chinese Tinkling: Chinoiserie in Das Lied von der Erde

“Der Einsame im Herbst [the Lonely One

in Autumn].”

by Allison Chu

Upon completing the first draft of Das Lied von der Erde [The Song of the Earth] in 1908, Gustav Mahler wrote to famed conductor and his close friend Bruno Walter, “I myself do not know how to express what the whole thing might be called. A beautiful time was granted me, and I believe it is the most personal thing I have yet created.” One could easily read Mahler’s biography as the inciting inspiration for Das Lied: the year in which he composed the work was filled with personal upheaval. Compositional successes encouraged repeated absences from his position as the director of the Vienna Opera, eventually contributing to his departure from his post in 1907. Shortly afterwards, Mahler lost his daughter, Maria, to scarlet fever, and he himself was diagnosed with a heart defect. Perhaps it was the feared “curse of the ninth symphony” that gave Mahler additional pause in titling his new creation. But as manuscripts for Das Lied indicate, it was by working through the texts that Mahler was able to confront his personal crises, possibly by seeing himself as the titular

Das Lied von der Erde fuses song and symphony together in a six-movement work for two voices—a tenor and an alto (or baritone)—and orchestra. The texts of Das Lied von der Erde have a complicated history. The source material

comes from a collection by the German poet Hans Bethge (1876-1946) titled Die chinesische Flöte: Nachdichtungen chinesischer Lyrik [The Chinese Flute: After-poems of the Chinese Lyric] (1907). A friend of his father-in-law, Theodor Pollak, gave Mahler Bethge’s anthology in the summer of 1907, and Mahler and Bethge went on to have a long friendship. Like many members of Viennese society at the time, the two had a fascination with images of the Orient, no doubt brought on by contemporary trends in Europe that reflected the West’s relationship with, and presence in, the East. Over the course of the nineteenth century, increased exchange between the East and West had led to the rise of new academic studies in sinology, as well as a codified “vision of Cathay” borne out in literature, decorative arts, and music. By late century, displays at the World Exposition in Vienna in 1873, as well as pavilions constructed at the Paris Expositions at the end of the nineteenth century, popularized the aesthetics and motifs that became known first as chinoiserie, and later, when trade with Japan opened, japonisme. In both cases, the artistic trends marked material objects and cultural products with a sense of exotic fantasy and playfulness.

Bethge’s collection contains the subtitle “After-poems of the Chinese Lyric,” a significant designation that references the relationship of these texts to their origins. The collection’s poems are best considered imitations of their Chinese counterparts; Bethge’s anthology was based on Hans Heilmann’s Chinesische Lyrik [Chinese Lyric] (1905), which itself was derived from two French translations of Chinese poems: Le Marquis d’HerveySaint-Denys’s Poésies de l’époque des Thang [Poems from the Tang Era] (1862) and Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de Jade [Book of Jade] (1867). This complicated chain of attribution only underscores the secondary status and sense of reimagination encapsulated in Bethge’s subtitle. As Bethge himself writes, “The point is not to translate a poem literally, but rather to reconstitute to a certain extent the spirit, the style, the melody, of a poem in a foreign language.” As was typical of many enthusiasts of Chinese imagery at the time, Bethge had no access to the original Chinese poems. Yet Bethge’s reputation became intertwined with the success of Mahler’s setting of his words in Das Lied, and he went on to make a profitable career in popularizing Oriental poetry, including that of Arabic, Egyptian, Turkish, Japanese, and Indian origin. It is notable that his Die chinesische Flöte had a print run of nearly 100,000 copies. In 1921, Bethge published a second anthology of Chinese poems, titled Pfirsichbluten aus China [Peach Blossoms from China], dedicated to Mahler.

Despite Mahler’s significant reworkings of Bethge’s “afterpoems,” the texts that Mahler chose can be attributed to specific Chinese authors. In the closest approximations, we can identify poems by Li Bai as the source for movements I. “Das Trinkleid vom Jammer der Erde [The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of Earth],” IV. “Von der Schönheit [Of Beauty],” and V. “Der Trunkene im Frühling [The Drunk in Springtime]”; and

poems by Meng Haoran and Wang Wei contributed to movement VI. “Der Abschied [The Farewell].” The attributions for movements II and III are more controversial; it is likely that work by Qian Qi is the source for II. “Der Einsame im Herbst [The Lonely One in Autumn],” and that III. “Von der Jugend [Of Youth]” is derived from several sources by Li Bai. Mahler further obscures these Chinese poets’ words by changing the titles and adding supplemental words, sometimes to the extent of entirely new lines of text, in his musical setting.

Many scholars attribute Mahler’s choice of Chinese poetry to the many symbols that parallel Romantic imagery, such as nature, the artist, and the thematic ideal of beauty. Some have even considered the Chinese flute in the title of Bethge’s anthology as analogous to the Orphic lyre of Western Romantic symbolism. Yet one can hardly dismiss the clear chinoiserie in the textual references to porcelain, jade, silk, and lotus blossoms throughout the song cycle—all symbolic evocations of the Western vision of China.

Of the whole work, nowhere is Mahler’s interpretation of the Chinese texts more explicit than in in the third song, “Von der Jugend.” The song—the shortest of Das Lied—begins with the setting of a “pavilion of green and white porcelain,” accessible by a “bridge of jade.” Accompanying these textual images are the stereotypes of sonic chinoiserie, complete with delicate high flutes, thin homophonic textures, percussive articulation, and cymbals and gongs. “Von der Jugend” opens with a pentatonic melody in the flutes and the oboes, punctuated with the light tinkling of the triangle. Dainty trills ornament the simple melody as it is passed amongst the woodwinds.

Heard at the turn of the twentieth century, this exoticism was not only routine, but also the subject of praise. Mahler sadly did not live to hear the premiere of Das Lied; the symphonic song was only performed for the first time six months after the composer’s death as part of a two-day memorial celebration conducted by Bruno Walter. Amongst the reception of Das Lied, which generally debated the work’s generic hybridity and its autobiographical dimensions, are several references to the exotic episode of “Von der Jugend.” An unidentified author in the Halle Saale-Zeitung in October 1911 called the song “a little Chinese rococo picture,” while Ferdinand Keyfel, critic of the MünichenAugsburger Abendzeitung, identified the song as the “most original movement” that successfully imitates “the mood of the white Chinese porcelain.” Most problematic are the critics who

correlate Mahler’s Orientalist representations with his Jewish identity, complete with a dash of antisemitism: Mahler must have chosen these texts because he “recognized here the same voice of the Orient that spoke of paradise lost in his blood,” wrote critic William Ritter in the Swiss periodical La Vie Musicale Mahler’s works did “not conspicuously seek to ‘sinologize,’ but [rather sought that] which Mahler had naturally in his disposition.” In “Von der Jugend,” then, Mahler “washed on satin [with] the brush of a Japanese watercolorist.”

It is possible that Mahler had consulted sources of Chinese music. In the summer of 1908, while composing Das Lied, he received cylinder recordings of Chinese music from Paul Hammerschlag, a family friend. Furthermore, it is entirely likely that Mahler might have heard examples of East Asian musics, including those of Chinese, Japanese, and Javanese origin, at the Paris Exhibition in 1900. Yet the rendition of Chineseness that Mahler employed in Das Lied does little more than to serve as exotic color, a quick three-minute fantasy of the East in the imagination of a Viennese man. And, as part of the whole work’s cohesion, traces of these sonic colors can be found throughout the work, under more veiled guises.

As a piece of musical chinoiserie, then, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde finds good company alongside other Western sonic visions of the East. With its textual and musical clichés, Das Lied sits uneasily between our contemporary conversations about staging European conceptualizations of the East, as with works such as The Mikado (1885) and Madama Butterfly (1904), and what to do with the symphonic exoticisms of The Nutcracker (1892) and Scheherazade (1888). Doing away with the work solves little, given the prevalence of these musical signatures. Rather, hearing the fantasies of the East in Das Lied anew emphasizes the opportunity for a reinterpretation of the poems as flights of imagination.

Allison Chu, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University and a scholar of opera, American contemporary music, and race and identity.

For Further Reading:

Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate and Jennifer Milam, eds. Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchange between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (17961911). Brill, 2019.

Hamao, Fusako, “The Sources of the Texts in Mahler’s ‘Lied von der Erde.’” 19thCentury Music 19, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 83-95.

Hefling, Stephen E. Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Hutchinson, Ben. “The Echo of ‘After-Poetry’: Hans Bethge and the Chinese Lyric.” Comparative Critical Studies 17, no. 2 (19 August 2020).

Li, Edwin KK. C. “Re-translating Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association (23 July 2025): 1-35.

On the ArrangementSong of the Earth

By Brett Hodgdon

Introduction

When audiences see the name “Mahler” on a program, they often expect something grand: a huge orchestra, blazing brass, shimmering strings, and a musical journey that stretches the limits of time and emotion. Gustav Mahler was famous for symphonies that require vast orchestral forces and explore life, death, nature, love, and farewell on a cosmic scale. Yet the performance you are about to hear presents one of his most expansive works—Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”)—in a strikingly intimate form.

This version—arranged for chamber ensemble by Arnold Schoenberg and completed decades later by Rainer Riehn—invites us to experience Mahler’s masterpiece not as a towering orchestral monument but as something closer to chamber music—opera on a personal scale. For listeners interested in vocal drama and storytelling, this arrangement offers an especially direct path into the emotional heart of the piece.

Mahler’s Symphony of Song

Mahler completed Das Lied von der Erde in 1909, during a period of intense personal crisis. He had resigned from his post as conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, lost his young daughter to illness, and been diagnosed with a serious heart condition. At the same time, he was deeply immersed in poetry. The texts of Das Lied come from German adaptations of Chinese poems, brought together by the poet Hans Bethge. These poems meditate on nature, fleeting beauty, drunkenness, loneliness, and ultimately—farewell.

Mahler called Das Lied “a symphony for tenor and alto voice and orchestra.” Blending elements of a song cycle and a symphony, this work forged a new path for Mahler: six large-scale songs, alternating between tenor and alto, linked seamlessly into a symphonic and dramatic arc. In the original orchestration, Mahler deploys a full late-Romantic orchestra: large string sections, woodwinds in pairs (often with additional instruments like piccolo and English horn), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, harp, celesta, mandolin, and an extensive percussion battery. The sound world ranges from delicate chamber-like textures to overwhelming climaxes. Nature is evoked with birdcalls in the woodwinds, string textures suggesting wind in the trees, and funeral-like brass chorales that seem to stare into eternity.

Mahler, Schoenberg, and the Society for Private Musical Performances

Throughout his musical career in Vienna, Gustav Mahler’s music inspired younger composers, including Arnold Schoenberg, a pioneer of musical modernism and later of twelve-tone composition. Schoenberg and Mahler had first met in Vienna around 1903; and Mahler, who was fourteen years older than Schoenberg and an established figure in Viennese musical culture, took a serious interest in Schoenberg’s music, publicly praising early works of his such as Verklärte Nacht (1899) and his Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1906). The respect was mutual; Schoenberg expressed deep personal admiration for Mahler’s music and dedicated his influential treatise on harmony, Harmonielehre, to Mahler’s memory upon the older composer’s death in 1911.

Following Mahler’s death, during the years leading up to the First World War, the musical, political, and economic landscapes in Vienna shifted dramatically. Schoenberg—by this time fully dedicated to atonal composition—had left behind the lush romantic orchestrations of the late nineteenth-century symphonists and opera composers like Mahler and Richard Strauss, choosing instead to write pieces for smaller chamber ensembles, such as his Herzgewächse (1911) for soprano, harp, celesta, and harmonium; and his influential Pierrot Lunaire (1912) for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.

In the economically lean post-war season of 1918-1919, Schoenberg and his fellow Second Viennese School composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern founded the Society for Private Musical Performances (in German: Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen) in Vienna. Its purpose was radical: to present new and complex music in ideal listening conditions, free from hostile critics and distracted audiences. Over three seasons, from February 1919 until late 1921, the Society gave over 350 performances of works written in the twentieth century, including not only the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, but also their musical contemporaries such as Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and the recently deceased Gustav Mahler.

Schoenberg’s arrangement of Das Lied

Schoenberg began work on a chamber orchestration of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in 1920, with the aim of presenting Mahler’s massive song symphony for the more intimate venue of the Society, distilling Mahler’s original score to two violins, viola, cello, double bass, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, plus piano and harmonium.

Despite Schoenberg’s dedicated following at the Society, the harsh economic realities of 1920s Austria caused the Society to close in December 1921, sidelining several of Schoenberg’s chamber arrangement projects, including Das Lied. Schoenberg completed the first movement, “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” (“The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow”), and left only sketches of the other five movements.

The next decade brought dramatic changes for Schoenberg with the death of his first wife, his subsequent marriage to Gertrud Kolisch, and his eventual relocation to America with the rise of Nazi Germany in 1933. As he moved on to other musical projects, his version of Das Lied languished unperformed until the early 1980s, when the German composer and music theorist Rainer Riehn took it up, arranging the final five movements based on Schoenberg’s sketches. The only change he made to Schoenberg’s original conception was the re-addition of Mahler’s distinctive celesta to the final song, “Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”).

What Is Different in the Chamber Version?

What is Different in the Chamber Version?

The most obvious difference is scale. Instead of Mahler’s large orchestra, the Schoenberg/Riehn arrangement uses about 13-14 players:

• Single strings (one player per part rather than a full section)

• Flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), bassoon

• Horn

• Piano

• Harmonium

• Celesta (in the BLO performances, the harmonium and celesta will be played by the same player)

• A small percussion section

This scaled-down ensemble transforms the sonic landscape:

1. The Role of the Piano and Harmonium

In the original, Mahler often relies on the sheer weight of strings or brass to create emotional impact. A climactic moment in the first song, “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” (“The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow”), can feel almost overwhelming, with full orchestra blazing behind the tenor. In the chamber arrangement, those climaxes are leaner. Without a large string section to cushion and amplify the sound, every line becomes audible. Inner voices—often buried in the orchestral texture—emerge clearly. In the words of arranger Rainer Riehn, the music feels etched rather than painted in broad strokes. Instead of being swept away by sonic grandeur, we hear the fragility beneath the surface.

2. The Role of the Piano and Harmonium

One of the most distinctive features of Schoenberg’s arrangement is the prominent use of piano and harmonium. In the chamber version, the piano often replaces the orchestral fullness of Mahler’s original, providing harmonic support and rhythmic drive. The harmonium—a reed keyboard instrument with a gently sustained tone—adds a unique color. It can evoke organ-like warmth or an almost ghostly stillness. In “Der Abschied,” its soft, sustained chords contribute to an atmosphere of timeless suspension.

3. Strings as Soloists

In the original orchestration, the strings function as a large, blended body. In the chamber arrangement, each string part is played by a single musician. This transforms the character of the writing. Passages that once felt symphonic now take on the gossamer textures of a string quintet.

The intimacy is particularly striking in the final movement. When the character sings of twilight and departure, the sparse string lines feel almost like chamber opera accompaniment. Every dynamic nuance becomes expressive and personal.

4. Winds as Characters

With only one player per wind instrument, the winds take on a soloistic, almost theatrical presence. Birdcalls in the flute or oboe stand out vividly. The clarinet’s darker hues in moments of melancholy feel like individual voices in dialogue with the singer. For opera lovers, this can feel familiar: the orchestra is no longer a vast landscape, but rather a cast of instrumental “characters” interacting with the vocal line.

Experiencing the Work as Staged Performance

Because the chamber version uses fewer musicians, it lends itself especially well to staged performance. The singers are not competing with a massive orchestra; they can act with nuance and subtlety. The intimacy of the chamber ensemble enhances the sense that we are witnessing a personal journey rather than a public symphonic statement. The performers are collaborators in storytelling, not just interpreters of a monumental score.

Listening Tips for the Performance

1. Follow the Poetry

Even if you do not understand German, notice the recurring themes: nature, transience, farewell. The music mirrors the imagery—fluttering winds for birds, rocking rhythms for movement, stillness for reflection.

2. Notice Instrumental Colors

Listen for how individual instruments converse with the voice. A lonely flute line, a muted horn, or a quiet harmonium chord can carry enormous expressive weight.

3. Embrace the Intimacy

If you expect symphonic grandeur, you may initially be surprised. Allow yourself to experience the piece as chamber music—almost like a song cycle accompanied by a small ensemble.

4. Savor the Silence

Especially in “Der Abschied,” silence is part of the music. The pauses and sustained tones create a sense of suspended time.

Two Visions of the Same Masterpiece

The original orchestration of Das Lied von der Erde remains one of Mahler’s most awe-inspiring achievements. Its vast sonorities can evoke the immensity of nature and the existential scale of human longing.

The Schoenberg/Riehn arrangement offers a complementary vision. It strips away the monumental façade and reveals the intricate craftsmanship beneath. It turns a symphonic farewell into an intimate confession.

Neither version replaces the other. Instead, they illuminate different facets of the same work. Hearing the chamber arrangement can deepen one’s appreciation for Mahler’s genius—his ability to communicate both cosmic vastness and fragile humanity.

As you listen to this performance, enjoy the fact that you are not in a grand concert hall but in a more private space—a gathering of musicians, actors, and listeners sharing reflections on life’s beauty and impermanence.

When BecomesSpace the Show

By Anne Bogart

As a young director just finding my way into the world of theater and opera, I stumbled on the term “environmental theater,” coined by director Richard Schechner. It described a kind of theater in which the performance was not confined to a stage but unfolded through the entire field of action: the room itself, an outdoor or indoor setting, the performers, the spectators, the architecture, the equipment, even the smallest shifts of light, sound, and texture. In this approach, all these elements formed a single, interacting system rather than a picture to be looked at from a safe distance. As the usual divide between stage and audience vanished, every corner of the room became a place for acting and observing alike. The performance unfolded as a living network of interactions that connected everyone and everything present.

The idea of performance as a 360-degree experience stayed with me and quickly became a driving force rather than only a theory. Fresh out of college, with a thin resume and no professional credits to my name, I could not persuade any New York theaters to let me direct on their stages. I longed for a conventional theater, but circumstance pushed me to treat the city itself as my venue. In the mid-1970s I was living in Manhattan’s East Village, and there I gathered a group of actors willing to explore new possibilities with me. Together we began making performances on rooftops, in shop windows, in a cavernous abandoned East Village schoolhouse,

and against the backdrop of construction sites and looming high-rises. Audiences followed us into these unlikely corners of the city, eager to encounter familiar streets and venues transformed into strange, newly imagined worlds.

What I did not anticipate was how much craft those site-specific adventures would teach me. Staging work in the “real world” became a kind of open-air conservatory in which the city itself was both classroom and collaborator. I learned to shape stories out of whatever was available: the angle of a fire escape, the way late-afternoon sun sliced through a dusty window, the echo of footsteps in a school corridor, the wind funneling down an avenue and catching in an actor’s coat, architecture, natural light, the scale of a doorway or stoop, the texture of brick and concrete, even the rhythm of passing traffic. Each of these elements gradually taught me how to compose and shape a performance directly out of and within the world around me. In hindsight, it was as if I had been handed a series of lavish set designs without ever having to pay for them; the “designs” were already waiting in the surrounding streets and buildings, poised to acquire a different life each time they were seen.

By the time I finally stepped into what people called “real” theaters – with designers, budgets, and all the trappings of production – I realized that I was bringing to them a novel way of seeing. I thought about the environment first: how the whole space might hold a story; how bodies might move in relation to walls, balconies, aisles, and exits; how audiences might feel the air and light around them as part of the event. I could no longer think only in terms of a stage picture framed by a proscenium; the entire theater, the lobby, the ceiling, and the backstage corridors felt like potential playing space. The lessons from those early East Village performances stayed in my bones, shaping a practice in which every place, no matter how unassuming, could become charged, articulated, and theatrically alive.

In later years, the work we made in those odd corners of the city acquired a new name: “sitespecific theater,” meaning productions created for and inseparable from a particular place, in which the architecture, history, and social meanings of the site become central dramaturgical forces rather than mere backdrop. Unlike environmental theater, which can often be reimagined in many kinds of unconventional spaces, a truly site-specific piece is imagined for a single location, so that it feels as if it could not occur anywhere else without losing its core logic. At its best, the performance enters into conversation with the site’s past lives, allowing buried stories and hidden layers of both the space and the piece to surface.

If site-specific work is rooted in a particular place, shaped by the meanings, histories, and physical qualities of its location, then environmental theater expands that relationship, extending performance to fill the entire space and integrating performers and spectators within a shared environment. If environmental theater redefines performance through spatial immersion, then “immersive theater” turns its attention most directly to the audience’s experience – what it feels like to be inside the event rather than observing it from the outside. Immersive theater, in this sense, represents a further turn inward, away from the spatial conditions of the site and toward the subjective experience of the spectator. In immersive work, spectators may wander, choose their own vantage points, and sometimes interact with performers or objects, as if they had stepped through a door into the world of the play instead of taking a seat in front of it. Drawing on both environmental and site-specific traditions, immersive art remains distinct: it

uses space and environment to pull the audience into a heightened, participatory state, where the line between watching and doing grows deliberately porous, and the crucial element is not the singularity of the site but the sensation of being surrounded, implicated, and personally addressed.

Boston Lyric Opera borrowed the term “installation” from the visual art world to signal a way of making opera in which the primary medium is the total environment: space, bodies, objects, light, and sound arranged as a single, enveloping composition. In this model, opera is no longer placed inside a neutral container; an environment is built or adapted for audiences to step into – one that surrounds them, recalibrates their senses, and turns their movement, listening, and looking into active elements of the work. Over time, BLO has been building a distinct genre that treats opera almost like large-scale installation art, especially in projects sited in galleries, historic buildings, or industrial spaces, where architecture, circulation, and spatial proximity shape how the piece is seen, heard, and experienced. In this frame, an opera is not simply “set in” a space; it is composed in dialogue with that space, in the same way that a visual installation is conceived for a particular room or site. Lighting, sound bleed, sightlines, and the way bodies cluster or disperse in the room are treated as integral artistic variables rather than technical afterthoughts. This can mean fragmenting action into different zones, allowing the audience to wander or choose vantage points, or embedding performers throughout the environment so that music seems to rise out of the architecture itself.

Boston Lyric Opera has become a crucial creative partner for me because of the company’s willingness to take bold risks with both theatrical and non-theatrical spaces. My recent production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel at the legendary Colonial Theatre drew its power in part from that building’s history: we were working in the very same house where Carousel first played Boston in 1945, and the sense of layered memory, ghosts, and morphic resonance felt palpable in the room. Did we interact with ghosts? Perhaps. Was that uncanny echo of past performances an aspect of the production? I believe that it was.

Two earlier BLO productions I directed were even more explicitly shaped by their sites. For Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, BLO chose Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion because Atwood had imagined the Handmaids’ training center, the “Red Center,” as the repurposed Harvard gym, and the basketball arena closely matched the space in her mind. Staging the opera there meant that the story unfolded inside the very building that had

helped to generate it, so that the architecture itself seemed to echo and amplify the narrative of indoctrination and control. Our next collaboration, Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle paired with Alma Mahler’s Four Songs, took this spatial thinking even further at The Terminal at Flynn Cruiseport Boston. That vast, industrial hall became a psychological and musical landscape: its long rectangular volume, high ceilings, concrete columns, and harbor views all fed into the concept. The staging, sightlines, the three-sided audience configuration, and even the path up the escalator were built around the peculiarities of that terminal rather than any generic theater plan. Inside this environment, the production unfolded in what critics described as a “multi-sensorial” psychological thriller. Like an installation, the space was organized as a walk-through artwork with distinct zones – feminine and masculine realms, zones of memory and exposure – and the way audiences entered, moved, and chose where to look became an essential part of the piece’s meaning.

Boston Lyric Opera’s embrace of work beyond the proscenium deeply impresses me because it shows a rare willingness to take real artistic risks. The company challenges and trusts its artists to navigate unfamiliar architectures, unstable acoustics, and a live relationship with spectators who share the space as co-travelers rather than onlookers in the dark. Just as importantly, BLO challenges and trusts its audiences, inviting them into adventures that demand more of their attention, mobility, and imagination. These are genuine and rewarding challenges for both artists and spectators – experiences that ask something real of everyone involved. For these reasons, returning to BLO feels both bracing and deeply sustaining: the work demands more, and in being trusted and stretched, I am reminded why making theater and opera still matters – why it remains a living, breathing experience.

The Art of Supertitles

By Natalia St Jean

The first time I felt the full responsibility of operating supertitles in live performance made me fall in love with the craft. I was a graduate student at Boston Conservatory, the opera was Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, and the scene was the big confession scene, where convicted murderer Joseph De Rocher unravels emotionally and confesses to the double murder that landed him on death row. The trajectory of the scene –indeed, of the entire opera – has been building to this. It takes place after Joseph’s appeal for clemency has been denied, and Sister Helen Prejean is visiting him for the last time before his execution. The two of them have been holding the stage for several minutes, their conversation a tense sort of dance: Sister Helen trying to convince Joseph that confessing will let him go to his death with an unburdened soul, Joseph resisting the inescapable truth of his crime; and at last – at last – he breaks down and admits the awful truth, not only saying it aloud to Sister Helen, but also confronting it himself.

Just before he utters the words, the orchestra stops completely, and the singer playing Joseph is given total control of the moment. He gets to decide how long to hold the silence, how to show his agitation with his body language, how to use the drama of the breath, whether to convey a false start or two by mouthing the words he can no longer repress. Out in the audience, you can already imagine what he’s about to say: “I killed them, Sister. I killed them with my own two hands.” And yet, even knowing what’s about to happen, hearing the performer finally give voice to that line still feels like a gut-punch.

Now, imagine seeing the text for that line just a few breaths too early – and how that would absolutely kill the mood.

Supertitles – also commonly known as surtitles, or simply “titles” for short – are translations or transcriptions that are projected simultaneously alongside a live stage performance. Their earliest iteration for opera was created by Sonya Friedman, who developed subtitles for The Metropolitan Opera’s televised broadcasts in the 1970s and was subsequently hired by the Canadian Opera Company to create a version that could be operated during live, in-person performances. The “premiere” of supertitles accompanying the Canadian Opera Company’s 1983 Elektra – sung in German, with English titles projected for the audience – caused mixed and passionate reactions. Numerous directors,

conductors, managers, and other operatic luminaries rejected supertitles, feeling that they vulgarized the experience of operagoing. But others, like famous American soprano Beverly Sills, loved them – and so, overwhelmingly, did general audiences. Suddenly, opera – particularly works presented in another language – became easier to understand and therefore more accessible to a broader range of attendees. Singers were now engaging with more engaged audiences, who were responding to comedic and dramatic moments that they may have missed previously. These days, the use of supertitles is standard practice for most opera companies.

The Basics of Operation

So, how exactly do supertitles work? Specifics can vary from company to company – and even from production to production – but the basic elements are fairly consistent. During a performance, the titles operator reads from a score (often called a “calling score”) that has the cues for each title marked in the music. These cues are aligned with slides containing portions of the text, which are projected for the audience, and which the operator advances in time with the singers and orchestra. The software used for designing and projecting the slides can range from Microsoft PowerPoint to programs like Glypheo and Spectitular, which are specially designed for creating, editing, and displaying supertitles for theatre and opera. No matter the software, the operator must watch, listen, read, and remain attuned and responsive to subtle changes in artistic interpretation, such as a singer stretching a fermata just a little longer at the Saturday performance than she did at the Friday performance.

When I run supertitles for Boston Lyric Opera productions, my basic equipment also includes a “conductor cam” – a video monitor that shows me the conductor – so I can see their cues no matter where I am in the theater. This is crucial,

because sometimes the limitations of equipment, physical space, and other logistics mean that the supertitles operator is positioned with no sightline to the stage. Light travels faster than sound, so if I were to rely purely on what I heard from the stage in such a situation, my title cues could be noticeably behind, which could be distracting or jarring for the audience. A conductor cam enables me to attain a higher level of precision with my timing. I also usually have a headset – especially if I am in a different physical location from the rest of the production team – so if there is an issue with the projection equipment, I can alert the appropriate colleagues and continue operating titles while they fix the problem.

Boston Conservatory’s 2017 production of Dead Man Walking was my first show as a titles operator. During a staging rehearsal, I did, in fact, cue the text of that climactic confession too early. No one had to tell me to fix it – I felt immediately how badly it had landed. The cue was tricky for several reasons. Since the orchestra stops playing entirely, there is no rhythmic groove to follow – the line feels out of tempo, as if time has been suspended. Since the singer controls the moment, I watched him rather than the conductor. Our production was double-cast, and the two performers playing Joseph interpreted the moment differently, so I had to get used to their unique body language and timing. Normally, I might focus on the singer’s mouth to see when he is preparing to sing, but I couldn’t rely on that here: not only was he breathing heavily for dramatic reasons, but the staging had him positioned on his hands and knees with his arms covering his head! I decided to watch the sides of his body and learned to distinguish the change in his breathing that indicated he was about to sing – and I also deliberately delayed the cue until I had heard him sing the first few words, figuring that this was a spot where it was far better to risk being barely-noticeably late than being early. Thankfully, I had ample rehearsal time!

Design Considerations

To me, operating supertitles feels like being a silent part of the orchestra. I watch the conductor, listen to and breathe with the other performers, and – if I do my job right – fit seamlessly into the tapestry of the whole. I enjoy the precision it requires, as well as the challenges it presents. Designing supertitles opens up a whole other set of challenges. When I am preparing a calling score and building a slide deck, questions like these emerge:

• How do I balance faithfulness to the translation with practical considerations, such as how much text will fit on one slide or how long it will take to read?

• This is a really long line of text. Where are the logical places to break up the phrases and split the text over multiple slides?

• Where should blank slides be used?

• In this duet, the characters are singing different things at different times. Where should the cues go?

• This joke takes longer to sing in Italian than it does for the audience to read in English. How do I stretch, break up, delay, and/or rearrange

clearly still singing can be confusing and arguably more distracting to audience members unfamiliar with this convention, whose attention is then pulled away from the artistry to the question, “Where did the titles go?” (I have heard people discussing this very question during intermission on numerous occasions, with some wondering whether the projector broke, the titles operator made a mistake, or whether this is something they “just don’t get” about opera.) Projecting blank slides while singers are still singing can also disrupt the experience of operagoing for audience members who are Deaf or hard of hearing – who deserve an equally rich and nuanced experience of the performance – as well as for newcomers to the opera, some of whom may already be on the fence about whether opera is “for them.” The last thing an accessibility tool should be doing is creating a barrier to understanding and enjoyment.

Supertitles in Song of the Earth

Within the last couple of years, I’ve had some opportunities to begin exploring another array of questions: How can supertitles function as part of the entire visual experience of the opera? Can their color palette complement the set design? Can creative font choices entwine them more closely with the sensory mosaic that is an opera? Are there projects where supertitles can (and even should) become integrated into the overall artistic vision of the creative team, crafting a more immersive experience for the audience? Can this be accomplished without compromising accessibility?

These are some of the questions that the creative team of Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde) is posing to you, our audience, with the title design for this production. Rather than being an opera in a traditional sense – with a plot – Song of the Earth is a collection of poetry set to music, to which director Anne Bogart has overlayed an original script that introduces us to three characters who are inhabiting the same room in three different time periods (check out her dramaturgical note in the playbill for more information!) This provides a unique and interesting opportunity to experiment with the form, timing, and purpose of the accompanying supertitles. At this performance, the titles will be incorporated into the sensory environment that our friends at MASARY Studios are creating through multimedia projection design. You may see fragments of poetic phrases being projected at intervals deliberately chosen to align with certain musical gestures. You may feel yourself involved more deeply in the sensation which poetry can evoke – and which music can enhance – that time is suspended or moving in unusual ways. You may find yourself noticing rhythmic or melodic patterns in the music more vividly, enhanced by the pacing of the poetic text. You may experience the physical performance space in a more immersive way. No matter what you find yourself drawn to in this production of Song of the Earth, you will certainly experience something new alongside us – and, as with any art, only you get to decide what you think of it.

References & Further Reading List

https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2018/01/21/578663092/read-em-and-weepcelebrating-35-years-of-opera-supertitles

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/27/arts/the-subtle-work-of-making-supertitles.html

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-ca-cm-supertitles-opera-20130519-story.html

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LISTEN UP!

with Boston Lyric Opera Music Director David Angus

Song of the Earth - Das Lied von der Erde

This is regarded by many as Mahler’s greatest work, uniting his two main worlds of symphony and orchestral song, as he tried to trick fate by not calling it his ninth symphony! It breaks into 6 movements, though the first 5 take up only half of the work. The great finale alone is the other half – an arrival at, and acceptance of, the death that he knew was coming to him.

The "curse of the ninth" is a superstition in classical music that a composer's ninth symphony is destined to be their last, with the composer fated to die before completing a tenth. It is notably associated with Beethoven, Schubert, and Mahler.

The original score is for a colossal orchestra, which often makes a serious problem for hearing the singers in the biggest moments, and the complexity of the score is usually hard to discern when so many players are involved. Whilst I enjoy the power of the big orchestra, I have to say that this reduction by Schönberg gives us absolutely all the musical lines but on a scale that matches the voices. I find its clarity refreshing; it is in many ways even better than the original!

3rd movement

The opening of the whole work is big, wild and exciting, and the tenor has to use his full power and range in what really feels like the opening of a big symphony. However, from then on, the texture and energy are much more delicate, and I would instead recommend the magical third movement, only 3 minutes long, which is a light and playful chamber movement - a scherzo, full of charm and magic. The woodwind soloists wind around in pentatonic patterns - a nod to the Chinese texts - and the tenor sounds youthful and happy, for once!

Listen: https://open.spotify.com/track/7lmpMiOUa8nxbaFMV0pc5e?si=92cee9196953461a

4th movement

The mezzo-soprano takes it in turns with the tenor, and I would suggest listening to her central song, the 4th movement, which is a wonderful contrast between the sensuous musical depiction of lovely young girls by the lake in the sunshine, and the excitement of an interruption by a troop of youths on horses galloping by, with the music constantly accelerating until it almost gets out of control and the singer runs out of breath. My favourite section, however, is the coda, where the boys disappear and the fairest maiden is left looking longingly after their leader.

Listen: https://open.spotify.com/track/7cou5TXPV2qIravNhMnyL7?si=fe4e677bd7894493

6th movement

The huge final movement is a full 30 minutes long, and is the heart of the work, both emotionally and musically. At its centre lies the great instrumental funeral march with its wonderful painful beauty and passion. If nothing else, listen to this march build up from approximately 16 minutes in. The music has such power and tension that it becomes overwhelming. If you have time, let it play on to the heavenly end where Mahler’s love of the natural world and his acceptance of death gradually drift into eternity with the words “ewig, ewig” (forever, forever) repeated until they fade out. Such beautiful music!

Listen: https://open.spotify.com/track/7jrkWiuE8uarIPvlTl74vz?si=ba9c2889a9a5458a

GENERAL QUESTIONS TO GUIDE YOUR LISTENING

• What instruments do you hear?

• How fast is the music? Are there sudden changes in speed? Is the rhythm steady or unsteady?

• Key/Mode: Is it major or minor? (Does it sound bright, happy, sad, urgent, dangerous?)

• Dynamics/Volume: Is the music loud or soft? Are there sudden changes in volume (either in the voice or orchestra)?

• What is the shape of the melodic line? Does the voice move smoothly, or does it make frequent or erratic jumps? Do the vocal lines move noticeably downward or upward?

• Does the type of voice singing (baritone, soprano, tenor, mezzo, etc.) have an effect on you as a listener?

• Do the melodies end as you would expect, or do they surprise you?

• How does the music make you feel? What effect do the factors above have on you as a listener?

• What is the orchestra doing in contrast to the voice? How do the two interact?

• What kinds of images, settings, or emotions come to mind? Does it remind you of anything you have experienced in your own life?

• Do particularly emphatic notes (low, high, held, etc.) correspond to dramatic moments?

• What type of character (romantic, comic, serious, etc.) fits this music?

THE HISTORY OF OPERA

People have been telling stories through music for millennia throughout the world. Opera is an art form that is over 400 years old, with roots in Western Europe. Here is a brief timeline of its lineage.

Please note that all

and notice

RENAISSANCE (1500-1620)

1573 The Florentine Camerata was founded in Italy, devoted to reviving ancient Greek musical traditions, including sung drama.

1598 Jacopo Peri (1561-1633), a member of the Camerata, composed the world’s first opera –Dafne – reviving the classic myth.

1607 Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) wrote L’Orfeo, the first opera to become popular, marking him as the premier opera composer of his day and bridging the gap between Renaissance and Baroque music. His works are still performed today.

1637 The first public opera house, Teatro San Cassiano, was built in Venice, Italy.

BAROQUE (1600-1750)

1673 Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), an Italian-born composer, brought opera to the French court, creating a unique style, tragédie en musique, that better suited the French language. Blurring the lines between recitative and aria, he created fast-paced dramas to suit the tastes of French aristocrats.

1689 Henry Purcell’s (1659-1695) simple and elegant chamber opera, Dido and Aeneas, premiered at Josias Priest’s boarding school for girls in London.

1712 George Frederic Handel (16851759), a German-born composer, moved to London, where he found immense success writing intricate and highly ornamented Italian opera seria (serious opera). Ornamentation refers to stylized, fast-moving notes, usually improvised by the singer to make a musical line more interesting and to showcase their vocal talent.

CLASSICAL (1730-1820)

1750s A reform movement, led by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), rejected the flashy ornamented style of the Baroque in favor of simple, refined music to enhance the drama.

1805 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), although a prolific composer, wrote only one opera, Fidelio. The extremes of musical expression in Beethoven’s music pushed the boundaries in the late Classical period and inspired generations of Romantic composers.

1767

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) wrote his first opera at age 11, beginning his 25-year opera career. Mozart mastered and then innovated in several operatic forms. He wrote opera serias (serious operas), including La Clemenza di Tito; and opera buffas (comedic operas) like Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). He then combined the two genres in Don Giovanni, calling it dramma giocoso (comedic drama). Mozart also innovated the Singspiel, a German sung play featuring spoken dialogue, as in Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).

1816

Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) composed Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), becoming the most prodigious opera composer in Italy by age 24. He wrote 39 operas in 20 years. A new compositional style created by Rossini and his contemporaries, including Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini, would, a century later, be referred to as bel canto (beautiful singing). Bel canto compositions were inspired by the nuanced vocal capabilities of the human voice and its expressive potential. Composers employed strategic use of register, the push and pull of tempo (rubato), extremely smooth and connected phrases (legato), and vocal glides (portamento).

1853 Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) completed La Traviata, a story of love, loss, and the struggle of average people, in the increasingly popular realistic style of verismo. Verdi enjoyed immense acclaim during his lifetime, while expanding opera to include larger orchestras, extravagant sets and costumes, and more highly trained voices.

ROMANTIC (1790-1910)

The Golden Age of Opera

1842 Inspired by the risqué popular entertainment of French vaudeville, Hervé (1825-1892) created the first operetta, a short comedic musical drama with spoken dialogue. Responding to popular trends, this new form stood in contrast to the increasingly serious and dramatic works at the grand Parisian opera house. Opéra comique as a genre was often not comic, tending to be more realistic or humanistic instead. Grand opera, on the contrary, was exaggerated and melodramatic.

1865 Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883) Tristan und Isolde was the beginning of musical modernism, pushing the use of traditional harmony to its extreme. His massively ambitious, lengthy operas, often based in German folklore, sought to synthesize music, theatre, poetry, and visuals in what he called a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). The most famous of these was an epic four-opera drama, Der Ring des Nibelungen, which took him 26 years to write and was completed in 1874.

1871 Influenced by French operetta, English librettist W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) began their 25-year partnership, which produced 14 comic operettas, including The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. Their works inspired the genre of American musical theatre.

ROMANTIC (1790-1910)

1874

Johann Strauss II, (1825-1899) influenced largely by his father, with whom he shared a name and talent, composed Die Fledermaus, popularizing Viennese musical traditions, namely the waltz, and further shaping operetta

1896

Giacomo Puccini’s (1858-1924) La bohème captivated audiences with its intensely beautiful music, realism, and raw emotion. Puccini enjoyed huge acclaim during his lifetime for his works.

1911 Scott Joplin, (1868-1917) “The King of Ragtime,” wrote his only opera, Treemonisha, which was not performed until 1972. The work combined the European lateRomantic operatic style with African American folk songs, spirituals, and dances. The libretto, also by Joplin, was written at a time when when African Americans in the southern United States rarely had access to literacy resources and education.

1927 American musical theatre, commonly referred to as Broadway, was taken more seriously after Jerome Kern’s (1885-1945) Show Boat, with words by Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), tackled issues of racial segregation and the ban on interracial marriage in Mississippi.

1922

Alban Berg (1885-1935) composed the first completely atonal opera, Wozzeck, dealing with uncomfortable themes of militarism and social exploitation. Wozzeck is in the style of 12-tone music, or serialism. This new compositional style, developed in Vienna by composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), placed equal importance on each of the 12 pitches in a chromatic scale (all half steps), removing the sense of the music being in a particular key.

1945 British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) gained international recognition with his opera Peter Grimes. Britten, along with Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), was one of the first British opera composers to gain fame in nearly 300 years.

20TH CENTURY (1900-2000)

1987

John Adams (b. 1947) composed one of the great minimalist operas, Nixon in China, the story of Nixon’s 1972 meeting with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. Musical minimalism strips music down to its essential elements, usually featuring a great deal of repetition with slight variations.

1935 American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937), who was influenced by African American music and culture, debuted his opera, Porgy and Bess, in Boston, MA with an allAfrican American cast of classically trained singers. His contemporary, William Grant Still (1895-1978), a master of European grand opera, fused that with the African American experience and mythology. His first opera, Blue Steel, premiered in 1934, one year before Porgy and Bess.

1957

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), known for synthesizing musical genres, brought together the best of American musical theatre, opera, and ballet in West Side Story, a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet in a contemporary setting.

1986

Anthony Davis (b. 1951) premiered his first of many operas, X: The Life and Time of Malcom X, which reclaims stories of Black historical figures within the theatre space. He incorporated both the orchestral and vocal techniques of jazz and classical European opera in his score for a distinctly American sound, and a fully realized vision of how jazz and opera are in conversation within a work.

Today

Still a vibrant, evolving art form, opera attracts contemporary composers such as Philip Glass (b. 1937), Jake Heggie (b. 1961), Terence Blanchard (b. 1962), Ellen Reid (b. 1983), and many others. Composers continue to be influenced by present and historical musical forms in creating new operas that explore current issues or reimagine ancient tales.

THE SCIENCE AND ART OF OPERA

WHY DO OPERA SINGERS SOUND LIKE THAT?

Opera is unique among forms of singing in that singers are trained to be able to sing without amplification, in large theaters, over an entire orchestra, and still be heard and understood! This is what sets the art form of opera apart from similar forms such as musical theatre. To become a professional opera singer, it takes years of intense physical training and constant practice — not unlike that of a ballet dancer — to stay in shape. Poor health, especially respiratory issues and even allergies, can be severely debilitating for a professional opera singer. Let’s peek into some of the science of this art form.

How the Voice Works

Singing requires different parts of the body to work together: the lungs, the vocal cords, the vocal tract, and the articulators (lips, teeth, and tongue). The lungs create a flow of air over the vocal cords, which vibrate. That vibration is amplified by the vocal tract and broken up into words by consonants, which are shaped by the articulators.

BREATH:

Any good singer will tell you that good breath support is essential to produce quality sound. Breath is like the gas that goes into your car. Without it, nothing runs. In order to sing long phrases of music with clarity and volume, opera singers access their full lung capacity by keeping their torso elongated and releasing the lower abdomen and diaphragm muscles, which allows air to enter into the lower lobes of the lungs. This is why we associate a certain posture with opera singers. In the past, many operas were staged with singers standing in one place to deliver an entire aria or scene, with minimal activity. Modern productions, however, often demand a much greater range of movement and agility onstage, requiring performers to be physically versatile, and bringing more visual interest, authenticity of expression, and nuanced acting into the storytelling.

VIBRATION:

If you run your fingers along your throat, you will feel a little lump just underneath your chin. That is your “Adam’s Apple,” and right behind it, housed in the larynx (voice-box), are your vocal cords. When air from the lungs crosses over the vocal cords it creates an area of low pressure (Google The Bernoulli Effect), which brings the cords together and makes them vibrate. This vibration produces a buzz. The vocal chords can be lengthened or shortened by muscles in the larynx, or by changing the speed of air flow. This change in the length and thickness of the vocal cords is what allows singers to create different pitches. Higher pitches require long, thin cords, while low pitches require short, thick ones. Professional singers take great pains to protect the delicate anatomy of their vocal cords with hydration and rest, as the tiniest scarring or inflammation can have noticeable effects on the quality of sound produced.

RESONANCE:

Without the resonating chambers in the head, the buzzing of the vocal cords would sound very unpleasant. The vocal tract, a term encompassing the mouth cavity, and the back of the throat, down to the larynx, shapes the buzzing of the vocal cords like a sculptor shapes clay. Shape your mouth in an ee vowel (as in eat), then sharply inhale a few times. The cool sensation you feel at the top and back of your mouth is your soft palate. The soft palate can raise or lower to change the shape of the vocal tract. Opera singers often sing with a raised soft palate, which allows for the greatest amplification of the sound produced by the vocal cords. Different vowel sounds are produced by raising or lowering the tongue, and changing the shape of the lips. Say the vowels: ee, eh, ah, oh, oo and notice how each vowel requires a slightly lower tongue placement and slightly rounder lips. This area of vocal training is particularly difficult because none of the anatomy is visible from the outside!

ARTICULATION:

The lips, teeth, and tongue are all used to create consonant sounds, which separate words into syllables and make language intelligible. Consonants must be clear and audible for the singer to be understood. Because opera singers do not sing with amplification, their articulation must be particularly good. The challenge lies in producing crisp, rapid consonants without interrupting the connection of the vowels (through the controlled exhalation of breath) within the musical phrase.

Perfecting every element of this complex singing system requires years of training and is essential for the demands of the art form. An opera singer must be capable of singing for hours at a time, over the powerful volume of an orchestra, in large opera houses, while acting and delivering an artistic interpretation of the music. It is complete and total engagement of mental, physical, and emotional control and expression. Therefore, think of opera singers as the Olympic athletes of the stage, sit back, and marvel at what the human body is capable of!

Different Voice Types

Opera singers are cast into roles based on their tessitura (the range of notes they can sing most comfortably and effectively). There are many descriptors that accompany the basic voice types, but here are some of the most common ones:

Bass:

The lowest voice, basses often fall into two main categories: basso buffo, which is a comic character who often sings in lower laughing-like tones, and basso profundo, which is as low as the human voice can sing! Doctor Bartolo is an example of a bass role in The Barber of Seville by Rossini.

Baritone:

A middle-range lower voice, baritones can range from sweet and mild in tone, to darker dramatic and full tones. A famous baritone role is Rigoletto in Verdi’s Rigoletto. Baritones who are most comfortable in a slightly lower range are known as Bass-Baritones, a hybrid of the two lowest voice types.

Tenor:

The highest of the lower-range voices, tenors often sing the role of the hero. One of the most famous tenor roles is Roméo in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. Sometimes, singers with lower-range voices also cultivate much higher ranges, singing in a range similar to a mezzo-soprano or soprano by using their falsetto register. Called the Countertenor, this voice type is often found in Baroque music. Countertenors replaced castrati in the heroic lead roles of Baroque opera after the practice of castration was deemed unethical.

Each of the voice types (soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone, bass) also tends to be sub-characterized by tone descriptors such as “lyric” or “dramatic.” Lyric singers tend toward smooth lines in their music, sensitively expressed interpretation, and flexible agility. Dramatic singers have qualities that are attributed to darker, fuller, richer note qualities expressed powerfully and robustly with strong emotion. While it’s easiest to understand operatic voice types through these designations and descriptions, one of the most exciting things about listening to a singer perform is that each individual’s voice is essentially unique, so each singer will interpret a role in an opera in a slightly different way.

Soprano:

Contralto:

The lowest of the higher treble voices has a low range that overlaps with the highest tenor’s range. This voice type is less common.

Mezzo-Soprano:

Somewhat equivalent to an alto role in a chorus, mezzo-sopranos (mezzo meaning “middle”) are known for their full and expressive qualities. While they don’t sing frequencies quite as high as sopranos, their ranges do overlap, and it is a “darker” tone that sets them apart. One of the most famous mezzo-soprano lead roles is Carmen in Bizet’s Carmen

The highest voice. Some subtypes of the soprano voice include coloratura, lyric, and dramatic sopranos. Coloratura sopranos specialize in being able to sing fast-moving notes that are very high in frequency, often referred to as “color notes.” One of the most famous coloratura roles is the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

The Physics of Opera Singers

What is it about opera singers that allows them to be heard above the orchestra? It’s not that they simply singing louder. The qualities of sound have to do with the relationship between the frequency (pitch) of a sound, represented in a unit of measurement called hertz, and its amplitude, measured in decibels, which the ear perceives as loudness. Only artificially produced sounds, however, create a pure frequency and amplitude (these are the only kind that can break glass). The sound produced by a violin, a drum, a voice, or even smacking your hand on a table, produces a fundamental frequency as well as secondary, tertiary, etc. frequencies known as overtones, or as musicians call them, harmonics

The orchestra tunes to a concert “A” pitch before a performance. Concert “A” has a frequency of about 440 hertz, but that is not the only pitch you will hear. Progressively softer pitches above that fundamental pitch are produced in multiples of 440 at 880hz, 1320hz, 1760hz, etc. Each different instrument in the orchestra, because of its shape, construction, and mode in which it produces sound, produces different harmonics. This is what makes a violin, for example, have a different color (or timbre ) from a trumpet. Generally, the harmonics of the instruments in the orchestra fade around 2500hz. Overtones produced by a human voice—whether speaking, yelling, or singing— are referred to as formants

As the demands of opera stars increased, vocal teachers discovered that by manipulating the empty space within the vocal tract, they could emphasize higher frequencies within the overtone series—frequencies above 2500hz. This technique allowed singers to perform without hurting their vocal cords, as they are not actually singing at a higher fundamental decibel level than the orchestra. Swedish voice scientist Johan Sundberg observed this phenomenon when he recorded the world-famous tenor Jussi Bjoerling in 1970. His research showed multiple peaks in decibel level, with the strongest frequency (overtone) falling between 2500 and 3000 hertz. This frequency, known as the singer’s formant , is the “sweet spot” for singers so that we hear their voices soaring over the orchestra into the opera house night after night.

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When two people sing the same note simultaneously, the high overtones allow your ear to distinguish two voices.

A Resonant Place

The final piece of the puzzle in creating the perfect operatic sound is the opera house or theater itself. Designing the perfect acoustical space can be an almost impossible task, one which requires tremendous knowledge of science, engineering, and architecture, as well as an artistic sensibility. The goal of the acoustician is to make sure that everyone in the audience can clearly understand the music being produced onstage, no matter where they are sitting. A perfectly designed opera house or concert hall (for non-amplified sound) functions almost like gigantic musical instrument.

Reverberation is one key aspect in making a singer’s words intelligible or an orchestra’s melodies clear. Imagine the sound your voice would make in the shower or a cave. The echo you hear is reverberation caused by the large, hard, smooth surfaces. Too much reverberation (bouncing sound waves) can make words difficult to understand. Resonant vowel sounds overlap as they bounce off hard surfaces and cover up quieter consonant sounds. In these environments, sound carries a long way but becomes unclear or — as it is sometimes called — wet, as if the sound were underwater. Acousticians can mitigate these effects by covering smooth surfaces with textured materials like fabric, perforated metal, or diffusers, which absorb and disperse sound. These tools, however, must be used carefully, as too much absorption can make a space dry — meaning the sound onstage will not carry at all and the performers may have trouble

even hearing themselves as they perform. Imagine singing into a pillow or under a blanket.

The shape of the room itself also contributes to the way the audience perceives the music. Most large performance spaces are shaped like a bell – small where the stage is and growing larger and more spread out in every dimension as one moves farther away. This shape helps to create a clear path for the sound to every seat. In designing concert halls or opera houses, big decisions must be made about the construction of the building based on acoustical needs.

Even with the best planning, the perfect acoustic is not guaranteed, but professionals are constantly learning and adapting new scientific knowledge to enhance the audience’s experience.

NOTES TO PREPARE FOR THE OPERA

You will see a full dress rehearsal – an insider’s look into the final moments of preparation before an opera premieres. The singers will be in full costume and makeup, the opera will be fully staged, and an orchestra will accompany the singers, who may choose to “mark,” or not sing in full voice, to save their voices for the performances. A final dress rehearsal is often a complete run-through, but there is a chance the director or conductor will ask to repeat a scene or section of music. This is the last opportunity the performers have to rehearse with the orchestra before opening night, and they therefore need this valuable time to work. The following will help you better enjoy your experience of a night at the opera:

THE PERFORMANCE:

• Arrive on time! Latecomers will be seated only at suitable breaks in the performance and often not until intermission.

• Dress in what you are comfortable in so you can enjoy the performance. For some, that may mean dressing up in a suit or gown; for others, jeans and a t-shirt is fine. Generally, “dressycasual” is what people wear. Live theatre is usually a little more formal than a movie theater.

• At the very beginning of the opera, the concertmaster of the orchestra will ask the oboist to play the note “A.” You will hear all the other musicians in the orchestra tune their instruments to match the oboe’s “A.”

• After all the instruments are tuned, the conductor will arrive. You can applaud to welcome them!

• Feel free to applaud or shout "Bravo!" at the end of an aria or chorus piece if you really liked it. The end of a piece can usually be identified by a pause in the music. Singers love an appreciative audience!

• It’s OK to laugh when something is funny or gasp at something shocking!

• When translating songs, and poetry in particular, much can be lost due to a change in rhythm, inflection, and rhyme of words. For this reason, opera is usually performed in its original language. In order to help audiences enjoy the music and follow every twist and turn of the plot, English supertitles are projected. Even when the opera is in English, there are still supertitles.

• Listen for subtleties in the music. The tempo, volume, and complexity of the music and singing depict the feelings or actions of the characters. Also, pay attention to repeated words or phrases; they are usually significant.

THE PERFORMERS:

The singers, orchestra, dancers, and stage crew are all hard at work to create an amazing performance for you! Here’s how you can help them.

• Lit screens are very distracting to the singers, so please keep your phone off and out of sight until the house lights come up.

• Due to how distracting electronics can be for performers, taking photos or making audio or video recordings is strictly forbidden.

EACH OTHER:

The theater is a shared space, so please be courteous to your neighbors!

• Please do not take off your shoes or put your feet on the seat in front of you.

• Respect your fellow opera lovers by not leaning forward in your seat so as to block the person’s view behind you.

• Do not chew gum, eat, or drink while the rehearsal is in session. Not only can it pull focus from the performance, but the ushers are not there to clean up after you.

• If you must visit the restroom during the performance, please exit quickly and quietly.

Otherwise, sit back, relax, and let the action onstage pull you in. As an audience member, you are essential to the art form of opera — without you, there is no show!

Have Fun and Enjoy the Opera!