How a scholarly experiment in a Florentine drawing room became the most extravagant art form on earth, and why, four centuries and countless obituaries later, it is still singing.

Opera has a reputation problem, and it has had one for most of its life. To its detractors it is the most artificial of the arts, a world in which dying heroines sing at full volume for ten minutes and nobody thinks to call a doctor. To its devotees it is the only art form that asks for everything at once, music and poetry and theatre and painting and dance, and occasionally gets it. Both camps would be surprised to learn how it began. Opera was not born in a gilded horseshoe theatre or a royal court in full ceremonial dress. It was born in conversation, among a circle of Florentine intellectuals who believed they were not inventing anything at all. They thought they were restoring something ancient. In trying to bring back the drama of classical Greece, they created the defining spectacle of the modern world.

An experiment in Florence

In the last decades of the sixteenth century, a group of musicians, poets and noblemen began meeting in Florence at the house of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi. History remembers them as the Florentine Camerata, and their obsession was ancient Greek tragedy. They were convinced, on the evidence of classical texts, that the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides had been sung throughout, and that this fusion of music and speech explained the legendary emotional power of Greek theatre. The polyphonic music of their own day, with its interweaving voices, seemed to them incapable of such power, because no listener could follow the words. Vincenzo Galilei, a lutenist and theorist whose son Galileo would soon point a telescope at the heavens, argued for a radical alternative: a single voice, singing in the natural rhythms of speech, supported by simple chords. They called it monody, and it was the seed from which everything else grew.

The experiments turned into theatre with remarkable speed. Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, performed around 1598, is usually counted as the first opera, though most of its music is lost. His Euridice, staged in Florence in 1600 for the wedding festivities of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV of France, survives complete, a slender and rather solemn thing built almost entirely from that new speech-song. But the work that proved the idea could live belongs to Claudio Monteverdi. His Orfeo, first performed at the Gonzaga court in Mantua in 1607, took the same myth of the musician who sings his way into the underworld and clothed it in genuine theatrical flesh: rich instrumental colour, dances, choruses, and above all a musical language that could turn on a single word. When Orfeo learns of Euridice’s death, the music seems to stop breathing. Four centuries later, it still works on an audience. Opera had found its first genius within seven years of finding its name.

Opera goes public

For its first three decades opera remained a courtly luxury, staged for weddings and state visits and paid for by princes. The decisive change came in Venice, a mercantile republic with no royal court to speak of but plenty of citizens with money and an appetite for entertainment. In 1637 the Teatro San Cassiano opened its doors as the first public opera house in the world, selling tickets to anyone who could pay. The effect was immediate and permanent. Once opera depended on box office rather than patronage, it had to please a crowd, and the crowd knew what it wanted: strong plots, spectacular stage machinery, comic servants, and above all magnificent voices. By the end of the century Venice supported more than a dozen opera houses, and the aging Monteverdi, who had moved to the city years earlier, wrote his late masterpieces for this new paying public.

Out of the commercial hothouse came the conventions that ruled opera for a century. Serious opera, the opera seria refined by the poet Metastasio, offered noble characters, classical subjects and a chain of elaborate arias designed to display emotion one state at a time. Comic opera, the opera buffa that grew up between and beneath the serious acts, offered scheming servants, ridiculous masters and tunes an audience could hum on the way home. And at the centre of the economy stood the singers, above all the castrati, male sopranos whose unearthly combination of power and agility made them the first international superstars of music. The most famous of them, Farinelli, earned fees that scandalized moralists across Europe and spent nearly a decade singing the Spanish king to sleep. Composers as great as Handel, running opera companies in London, lived and died by their ability to secure such voices. Star culture, diva worship, the scandal of the fee: all of it was in place by 1730.

Mozart and the perfection of both

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart inherited both traditions, the serious and the comic, and did something no one before him had managed: he perfected them simultaneously, often within the same work. His mature operas, written in the last decade of his short life, treat the old conventions not as cages but as instruments. The Marriage of Figaro, from 1786, takes the machinery of opera buffa, the disguises and locked doors and mistaken identities, and fills it with human beings so real that the Countess’s sorrow can silence a comic plot in mid-spin. Don Giovanni, first staged in Prague in 1787, fuses comedy and damnation so completely that audiences have argued ever since about which it is. Così fan tutte turns a cynical wager into an unbearably tender study of how hearts actually behave. And The Magic Flute of 1791, written for a popular suburban theatre in Vienna, folds fairy tale, farce and solemn Enlightenment ritual into a single evening that children and philosophers can watch side by side.

What Mozart demonstrated, once and for all, was that opera’s peculiar artifice could carry the full weight of human truth. In the ensemble finales of Figaro, where six or seven characters sing at once, each pursuing a separate agenda in music that remains perfectly clear, he achieved something no spoken play can do: simultaneous inner lives, made audible. Every composer who came after him worked in his shadow, whether they admitted it or not.

The imperial age: bel canto and Verdi

The nineteenth century was opera’s imperial age, the period when it stood unchallenged at the centre of European culture. Its opening decades belonged to Italy and to the style later called bel canto, beautiful singing, whose masters were Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini. Rossini conquered Europe before he was thirty with comedies of irresistible mechanical brilliance, The Barber of Seville first among them, then retired at the height of his fame to devote himself, more or less, to dinner. Bellini spun long, aching melodic lines that Chopin studied like scripture; the great scene of his Norma remains a summit that sopranos approach with reverence and fear. Donizetti, astonishingly prolific, gave the century its defining mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor, where a soprano’s voice unravels along with her mind. The stage for much of this was Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, opened in 1778 and by then already the most consequential opera house in Italy, part theatre, part stock exchange, part national parliament of taste.

Then came Giuseppe Verdi, and opera in Italy became something more than entertainment. His breakthrough, Nabucco in 1842, contained a chorus of Hebrew exiles mourning a lost homeland, and Italians living under Austrian rule heard in Va, pensiero an anthem for a nation that did not yet exist. In the years of the Risorgimento, the cry of Viva Verdi doubled as a coded political slogan, the composer’s name spelling out the initials of Vittorio Emanuele, king of Italy. Verdi repaid the devotion with a string of works, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Aida, Otello, Falstaff, that carried Italian opera from melodrama to Shakespearean depth across half a century. When he died in 1901, hundreds of thousands lined the streets of Milan, and the crowd sang Va, pensiero as the cortege passed. No composer, before or since, has been mourned quite like that.

Wagner, Paris and the total artwork

North of the Alps, opera’s imperial age took a different and more disruptive shape. In Paris, the wealthiest theatrical marketplace in the world, grand opera reigned: five-act historical epics by Giacomo Meyerbeer and his rivals, with ballets, processions, shipwrecks and massacres staged at ruinous expense. The genre eventually got the building it deserved when the Palais Garnier opened in 1875, a mountain of marble, gilt and allegorical sculpture that remains the most theatrical opera house ever built, its grand staircase a stage on which the audience performed for itself.

Richard Wagner despised almost all of this, and his contempt reshaped the art form. Opera, he argued, had degenerated into a concert in costume; what it should be was a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork in which music, poetry, staging and myth fused into a single dramatic organism. He abolished the old architecture of separate arias in favour of an endless melodic stream, wove his dramas together with recurring musical ideas called leitmotifs, and expanded harmony to the edge of dissolution in Tristan und Isolde. Then, because no existing theatre suited his purposes, he built his own at Bayreuth, with a hidden orchestra pit and a darkened auditorium, innovations so successful that we now take them for granted everywhere. The first complete performance of his four-evening Ring of the Nibelung inaugurated the Bayreuth festival in 1876, an event that drew emperors, critics and pilgrims from across the world. After Wagner, no serious composer could write opera as if nothing had happened.

Puccini and the great houses

As the century turned, opera’s centre of gravity was shifting in two directions at once, toward rawer subject matter and toward new continents. In Italy the movement called verismo dragged opera out of the palace and into the village square and the tenement, beginning with Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in 1890 and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci two years later, operas of jealousy and knife blades among ordinary people. Their greatest heir was Giacomo Puccini, who tempered verismo’s brutality with the most seductive melodic gift since Verdi. La bohème in 1896 made grand tragedy out of cold garrets and lost buttons; Tosca staged torture and murder against real Roman landmarks; Madama Butterfly found its victim in the collision of American swagger and Japanese silence. Puccini died in 1924 with Turandot unfinished, and at its premiere at La Scala the conductor Arturo Toscanini laid down his baton at the point where the composer had stopped, telling the audience that here the master had died.

By then opera had long since outgrown Europe. New York’s Metropolitan Opera opened in 1883, founded by new-money families who could not get boxes at the old Academy of Music, and grew into the richest company in the world, the house of Caruso and Toscanini. Buenos Aires answered in 1908 with the Teatro Colón, a theatre of legendary acoustics that made the Argentine capital an obligatory stop for every great singer of the age. And in 1973 the form acquired its most famous silhouette of all when the Sydney Opera House, Jørn Utzon’s cascade of white sails on Bennelong Point, opened on Sydney Harbour and became, almost instantly, the emblem not just of a city but of an entire continent. It is a nice irony that the most recognizable building of the twentieth century was built for an art form the seventeenth century invented.

The twentieth century breaks the rules

The new century began with a scandal. Richard Strauss’s Salome, first staged in Dresden in 1905, set Oscar Wilde’s play with a sensual violence that got it banned in Vienna and, after a single performance, at the Met; his Elektra pushed the orchestra to a pitch of dissonant frenzy from which he then elegantly retreated into the silver-rose nostalgia of Der Rosenkavalier. The genuinely radical step came in 1925 in Berlin, when Alban Berg’s Wozzeck put a poor, bullied, hallucinating soldier at the centre of an opera composed in the fractured post-tonal language of the Second Viennese School. It should have been box office poison. Instead it gripped audiences then and grips them now, proof that opera’s emotional machinery could survive the loss of the very harmony it was built on.

After the Second World War it was an Englishman who showed that the grand tradition could still produce repertory classics. Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, premiered in London in 1945, made a tragic protagonist of an outcast fisherman in a gossiping coastal town, and its orchestral sea interludes joined the small company of twentieth-century music that everybody knows. Three decades later the avant-garde arrived from an unexpected direction. Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, created with the director Robert Wilson in 1976, dispensed with plot, character and interval across nearly five hours of pulsing, repetitive music, and its two sold-out performances at the Met made minimalism impossible to ignore. Glass went on to write operas about Gandhi and the pharaoh Akhnaten, John Adams put Nixon in China on stage in 1987, and opera discovered that the news, ancient or breaking, could be sung.

Opera now

The story of opera since then is, to a surprising degree, a story of falling barriers. The first and humblest revolution was a strip of text. In 1983 the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto projected translated captions above the stage during a performance of Elektra, and the surtitle was born. Purists were appalled; audiences were liberated. For the first time in the art form’s history, a newcomer could follow every twist of an Italian libretto without homework, and within a generation titles had become universal, glowing above prosceniums or on seat backs from Vienna to Tokyo. It is hard to think of a cheaper innovation that has done more for any art form’s accessibility.

The second revolution was the cinema. In 2006 the Metropolitan Opera began beaming live Saturday matinee performances to movie theatres as The Met: Live in HD, and the experiment became an institution: the series is still running two decades later, its 2025 to 2026 season playing in cinemas across dozens of countries, and it has sold tens of millions of tickets to people who may never set foot on Lincoln Center’s plaza. That plaza, meanwhile, hosts free outdoor screenings each summer, part of a broader culture of open-air simulcasts, from parks in San Francisco to piazzas in Milan, that returns opera, at no charge, to the crowds Venice first courted in 1637.

The third revolution concerns whose stories get sung. In September 2021 the Met opened its season with Fire Shut Up in My Bones by the jazz trumpeter and film composer Terence Blanchard, based on the memoir of the columnist Charles M. Blow. It was the first opera by a Black composer ever staged by the company in its then 138-year history, and its success was not a one-night gesture: Blanchard returned, new commissions followed, and companies across the world have widened their repertoires with works by women and composers of colour telling contemporary American, African and Asian stories. The art form that once revolved around castrati singing Roman emperors now stages memoirs of the Louisiana backwoods, and sells out doing it.

The art form that refuses to die

Opera has been pronounced dead with wonderful regularity: when the castrati vanished, when Wagner stretched harmony past its limits, when cinema arrived, when television arrived, when the last of the legendary voices retired, whenever a season’s deficits made the newspapers. The obituaries are now part of its tradition, as ritualized as the ovation. Yet the pattern of its whole history points the other way. An art form invented by antiquarians became popular entertainment in Venice, a national cause in Italy, a religion at Bayreuth, a skyline in Sydney and a cinema event in shopping malls on six continents. Each time it has seemed exhausted, it has found a new house, a new public or a new voice. Four hundred years on, the Florentine experiment is still running, and the curtain shows no sign of coming down.