Today was a good introduction to what the opera is going to be like Wednesday night. In this class we learned a lot about different types of opera singers by watching different clips of well-known operas. To be honest, I wasn’t very excited about going to see the opera prior to this class because I had never seen them before, and I imagined them to be very boring because there would only be singing. Now that I have more of an idea on what opera is all about from seeing different opera clips, I am excited to see Turandot this Wednesday.

First, we watched Don Giovanni. It was a light-hearted comedy about a noble man named Don Giovanni being very promiscuous and he was not afraid to show it. It says a lot about how society viewed men of higher class who are promiscuous during the time period of the opera. I enjoyed this clip of the opera a lot because of the light-hearted feeling of the music, and the comedy of the scene. The music blended very well with the singer’s voice, and the singer’s acting was good which made it entertaining.

Later on we watched a clip from La Traviata that was sung by Beverly Sills. I didn’t like this scene because although she had a very good voice and the music was nice, it had very bad acting in it. It would have been very difficult to follow this scene without subtitles. The singer is saying how she has very conflicting feeling about falling in love. However, you get the feeling that she is happy instead of conflicted about her love because of her facial expressions and how she has very up beat movements.

Finally, we watched three clips of one of the most famous opera arias of all time, Nessun Dorma, from Turandot, sung by Pavarotti. Unlike the previous two clips, there was no acting involved, and the singer was stationary the entire time. However, I enjoyed the clips. I had no idea that Opera singers were not in their prime until their forties, and I was very impressed by Pavarotti because of his age and the longevity of his career. His last performance was during the 2006 winter Olympics, which is an extraordinary accomplishment.