Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.

Lately in this Opera Geek series, we've been following opera's path chronologically, citing a few significant milestones along the way — from the art form's earliest days through the Baroque, the age of Mozart, bel canto, big hitters like Verdi and Wagner, and trends in postwar Europe. Today, a brief look at opera here at home.

As the post-WWII economy flourished, opera in America blossomed. From composers and singers to audiences, philanthropy and new venues, everything operatic seemed to be on the rise. New opera houses sprouted up in the 1950s and '60s in Dallas, Houston, Santa Fe, Tulsa, Minneapolis, Seattle and Louisville. Opera also grew at the academic level, as opera workshops became more prominent in universities.

The People's Opera

Even before that opera boom, there was the New York City Opera, founded during the war years in 1943 and dubbed "the people's opera" by mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

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Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.

Although a few radical composers had no use for opera in the mid-20th century (like Pierre Boulez, who infamously advocated blowing up the world's opera houses), the art form in Europe brushed itself off and began to thrive again after World War II.

Exactly a month after the official German surrender, one of the great operas of the century, Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, received its premiere in London. Britten was an untested opera composer working in a country and language that had seen little operatic success. Yet the triumph of Peter Grimes signaled a new era for British opera and a sparkling launch to Britten's stage career. Within three years it would be performed all over Europe and in the U.S. with Leonard Bernstein as its champion. The theme of a protagonist (Grimes, a surly and misunderstood fisherman) unable to find his place in society was one a post-war populace could empathize with and one Britten would return to in future operas such as Billy Budd. Britten would write 13 more stage works for adults and children, including large-scale operas, chamber operas, church parables and miracle plays, many of which remain in the repertoire today.

Jump-Starting Germany

Germany had a tougher time jump-starting after the war, as funding for opera had shifted from the old patronage system to state and municipal support. But one composer, Hans Werner Henze, put his stake in the ground and flourished, beginning in the early 1950s. A decade later, critic Andrew Porter raved about Henze, calling him an "inspiration, interpreter and prophet for those whose musical understanding was formed after the war."

One of Henze's most approachable operas is Der Junge Lord (The Young Lord), a dark comedy of manners that looks back to old-fashioned Italian opera buffa with whiffs of Mozart and nods to Rossini. It was commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin and debuted there in 1965. The opera's story concerns the residents of a small town whose lives are upended when a rich and eccentric newcomer shows up. It ends with a shocking twist, as the nobleman's nephew wildly disrobes at a ball to reveal that he is nothing more than an ape.

France's Mystical Messiaen

France could have used an opera composer as prolific and successful as Henze. Opera seemed to become less relevant in France, and if anything ballet captured the imaginations of leading composers like Darius Milhaud. Opera was relevant to Francis Poulenc, but he wrote only one major, full-length work, the compellingly beautiful psycho-political-religious drama Dialogues of the Carmelites, which premiered in 1957.

The only Frenchman who could fill Claude Debussy's distinctive shoes was Olivier Messiaen, a radical composer of deeply religious convictions who wrote music of startling sensuality. He was a master keyboardist who became the organist at La Trinité in Paris and remained there for 50 years. Messiaen came to opera late in life — he was 76 when he completed his dramatically static Saint Francois d'Assise, which plays out as much like an oratorio as an opera. It premiered in Paris in 1983.

Crafting his own libretto from the writings of St. Francis, Messiaen unfolds his story in a series of eight tableaux, recounting the saint's journey toward the divine. In a stunning scene at the end of the opera, a full orchestra and chorus rise up in a massive alleluia, honoring the death of Francis. Incorporating Messiaen's beloved birdsong orchestrations, plus unexpected instruments like the Ondes Martenot, the opera sounds like no other ever created. As it requires 120 instrumentalists and a 150-voice choir, and is nearly five hours long, it's not surprising that Saint Francois, for all its unusual beauty, has not secured a place in the repertoire.

A Comedy In The Macabre

György Ligeti took 13 years to write Le Grande Macabre, which finally premiered at the Royal Opera in Stockholm in 1978. That the libretto was originally in German then translated to Swedish and recorded in English (in the excerpt below) speaks to the composer's nomadic life and the ever shifting styles of music he embraced and created. He was born of Hungarian Jewish parents in a part of Transylvania that is now Romania, but studied in Budapest. He became an Austrian citizen and a visiting professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of music, Berlin's Academy of the Arts and Stanford University.

Le Grande Macabre is a surreal black comedy inspired by the chaotic 16th-century paintings of Brueghel (set in "Breughelland") and populated with an odd troupe of characters, including a transvestite visionary astronomer, his sexually adventuresome wife, a crazed chief of police (scored for coloratura soprano) and Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre himself, who enters from an open grave declaring that he, with the help of a comet, will destroy the world at midnight. The overall theme might be summed up in the final chorus: "Fear not to die, good people all. No one knows when his hour will fall. And when it comes, then let it be. Farewell, till then in cheerfulness!"

Ligeti's dramatic sense of humor is evident from the first note. The opera's overture is scored for car horns. After that, the music is wildly eclectic, with snippets of shimmering lyricism, strangled quotes from Rossini and Beethoven and squeaks and grunts from various sections of the orchestra. The piece, although not performed often, seems to be a success whenever it shows up, as was the case when it became the hit of the New York Philharmonic's 2009-10 season.

Technologies And Trends

As it did before World War II, opera had to adapt to new trends and technologies after the war. The ease of jet travel saw singers and conductors spreading themselves ever thinner, with increased burnout and fewer opportunities to cultivate tight ensemble singing with regular colleagues.

The supremacy of the celebrity singer continued undiminished, but slowly a new star was rising — the stage director. Increasingly, directors dominated almost all aspects of an opera production, deconstructing plot lines and updating old settings to present day situations. The phenomenon has strained the relationship between some directors and singers.

As far as language goes, opera became easier to understand in the past several decades, especially in the U.S. Most opera houses now employ supertitles, allowing European operas to be heard in their original tongues while translations flash above the stage on a slim screen.

Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.

In this series of Opera Geek posts were tracking a some of opera's significant milestones, making our way from the art form's earliest days, through the Baroque, the age of Mozart, bel canto and big hitters like Verdi and Wagner.

Although Giacomo Puccini reached his peak in the opening decades of the 20th century, his music mostly looks back to the romance of the 19th. But while he was prospering in the popularity of tuneful operas like Madama Butterfly, Richard Strauss was shaking things up in Germany with Salome. This outrageous — for 1905 — opera helped usher in the age of modernism with its jagged dissonances and shocking plot.

Alex Ross begins his book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century with Salome. He sets the scene of the opera's first hearing in the Austrian city of Graz, where music luminaries including Puccini, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler gathered to hear what all the fuss was about.

"The Austrian premiere of Salome," Ross writes, "was just one event in a busy season, but, like a flash of lightning, it illuminated a musical world on the verge of traumatic change. Past and future were colliding; centuries were passing in the night. Mahler would die in 1911, seeming to take the Romantic era with him. Puccini's Turandot, unfinished at his death in 1924, would more or less end a glorious Italian operatic history that began in Florence at the end of the 16th century."

Debussy's Floating Harmonies

Even before Strauss' operatic eruptions, France felt a mild musical earthquake with the 1902 premiere of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Debussy changed the face of opera not so much by piling on new innovations, but by shedding traditional trappings. He didn't need arias, set pieces or forceful declamatory singing.

Before he began composing Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy already had radical theories for what an ideal opera could be. He advocated using silence as a means of expression, and felt music and singing had become too predominant and musical settings too cumbersome.

Pelléas is a quiet, dimly lit work, heavy on atmosphere, where harmonies float untethered and melodies waft in and out of a sonic mist. It's a perfect match for the dreamy, insular world of the opera's libretto, a story of illicit love and its consequences.

The most celebrated feature of the opera, according to critic Stephen Walsh, is the seamless relationship between music and language. He notes that "its unique vocal declamation carries the text on a continuous, fluid cantilena, somewhere between chant and recitative, a note to a syllable." Pelléas, Walsh writes, is a key work for the 20th century in that it provided "a new approach to form, harmony and texture which profoundly influenced composers as various as Stravinsky, Messiaen and Puccini."

A Late-Blooming Leoš Janáček

While Debussy was merging music and language in new ways in France, a scrappy composer named Leoš Janáček was developing his style of setting his native Czech. It took Janáček a long time to gain a foothold on the operatic stage, but he finally broke through, at age 61, with the 1904 premiere of Jenůfa, his sixth attempt at opera. Little did he envision while struggling for recognition that one day he would be hailed as a giant among 20th century opera composers.

The genius of Janáček comes in two forms: his unique integration of Czech and Moravian speech patterns into his music (undoubtedly influenced by his collecting of folk song) and his keen instinct for tightly woven drama with unorthodox subjects. His Cunning Little Vixen was based on a series of comics featuring animals. The Makropoulos Case features a 337-year-old opera singer as its title character. And in a nod to science fiction, the title character of The Excursions of Mr. Broucek travels back in time to the 15th century and winds up on the moon. There's a certain rough-hewn, even prickly quality about Janáček's music. It can be quirky one moment then pivot instantly to yearning, passionate melody.

A Schoenberg Student Shines

At the time he attended Strauss' Salome, Schoenberg hadn't yet developed his 12-tone technique of writing music, but he was pushing toward an atonal style and attracting students. One of those was fellow Vienna native Alban Berg, who saw Schoenberg as a teacher, mentor and father figure. Although Berg was a disciple, his music seemed to fall easier on the ear than Schoenberg's, blending the newly acquired atonalism with the post-Romantic sensibilities of Strauss and Mahler. Berg's opera Wozzeck, which premiered in 1925, would surpass in popularity anything his teacher wrote for the opera stage.

Go Gershwin

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, George Gershwin, a son of poor Russian immigrants, was crafting tuneful stage works like Lady, Be Good! and Oh, Kay! Before his string of hit musicals, the 16-year-old Gershwin got his start as a song-plugger for a Tin Pan Alley publisher, quickly moving on to writing songs of his own and eventually collaborating with his older brother Ira, a lyricist. He would blend those hummable songs with jazz and classical music to create what some have called the great American opera, Porgy and Bess.

Something of a cross between opera and musical theater, Porgy premiered in 1935 and was based on a novel by Dubose Heyward set in the fictional black enclave of Catfish Row in Charleston, S.C. Gerswhin called Porgy his "folk opera," and in that way he was not far from Janacek, creating a unique mix of highbrow and lowbrow music with vernacular speech. Gershwin's lone operatic work spawned a handful of irresistible songs — including "Summertime," "It Ain't Necessarily So," and "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" — that quickly became standards and have been covered by countless jazz and pop musicians.

Opera in the 20th century would continue to adapt and transform itself in the face of new musical trends, social revolutions and world turmoil. But that's a story for next week.

Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.

After the death in 1848 of Gaetano Donizetti (a virtual composing machine who cranked out over 60 operas in 27 years), one man alone, Giuseppe Verdi, changed the face of Italian opera in the 19th century.

Verdi broke new ground at almost every turn in his career. In such early successes as Ernani, he introduced a vibrant potency to music for lower male voices. In middle period works like Rigoletto and La Traviata, he deepened the richness of individual characters while broadening dramatic complexity. And in Verdi's late operas, he combined a new mastery of vocal expression with swift, taut pacing, turning Otello into a riveting thriller and Falstaff into a virtuosic, sparkling comedy.

Wagner The Game-Changer

Meanwhile, in Germany, Richard Wagner was turning opera on its head. Described by one observer as a "one man artistic movement," Wagner thought of himself (something he did a lot) as much more than a composer. He became an omnipotent creator who ruled over every aspect his expansive "music dramas," which he thought of as total works of art (Gesamtkunstwerke).

Wagner was unique in that he wrote all of his own librettos and obsessed over minute details of staging. He was the first to darken the house lights during performances, and the first to design a radically new opera house solely for his works. Wagner exploded the length, breadth and height of music theater, changing it forever. His gargantuan operas have inspired composers, authors, directors and even dictators.

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Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.

It's easy for opera fans to toss around the term "bel canto." It's much harder to actually define it. Literally, bel canto means "beautiful singing" in Italian, but it's so open-ended that it's come to mean anything from the lyrical trend in Roman cantatas from the 1640s to any particularly lovely snippet of vocalizing from any era. And then there's the inverse of bel canto — "can belto" — a handy put-down to be flung at any singer who just stands and barks.

But another important reference point for bel canto leads to a particular trend in Italian opera that was responsible for this so-called "beautiful singing." The style bloomed in the first few decades of the 19th century, starting with Gioacchino Rossini, moving through Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini, and winding up in the early operas of Giuseppe Verdi.

As opera orchestras (and opera houses) began to grow in size, composers shifted toward a slightly heavier vocal tone. No longer relying solely on the old-fashioned flurries of notes and roller coaster runs to wow audiences, they emphasized long, flowing melodies, where carefully placed (even disguised) breaths from the singer would preserve the unbroken quality of the lines. And yet, not all the pyrotechnics disappeared. Rossini included both the old florid style and new bel canto expressions in his operas, sometimes both within the same aria. His operas positively sparkled, yet his musical characterization could be shallow. Bellini was far more poetic in setting text, but it would take Verdi, after emerging from his early, self-described "galley years" to uncover an even deeper musical realization of characters. But that's a story for next time.

Below are a few bel canto excerpts that are beautiful indeed. Have a favorite bel canto aria? Tell us about it in the comments section.

Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.

As we noted last week, opera in the age of Handel and Vivaldi was an odd concoction of sober stories and wildly flamboyant arias, immaculately crafted to show off virtuoso singers. It was called opera seria, and its heavy rotation of plots became so well-known that audiences could talk, eat and drink their way through performances, stopping only to catch a few fireworks from the latest star castrato. Opera was bloating, and someone needed to burst its bubble.

Christophe Willibald Gluck, stationed in the musical capital of Vienna, was the man for the job. He had written a few pretty bombastic works himself but after a while, he'd had enough. In 1769, Gluck published his opera Alceste and in the preface he laid out his case for what opera should and should not be.

I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments ... I have sought to abolish all the abuses against which good sense and reason have long cried out in vain ... I have avoided making displays of difficulty at the expense of clearness ... I did not wish to arrest an actor in the greatest heat of dialogue in order to wait for a tiresome ritornello, nor to hold him up in the middle of a word on a vowel favorable to his voice, nor to make display of the agility of his fine voice in some long-drawn passage.

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Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.

As opera left its toddler years behind, it grew more restrictive and extravagant at the same time. Around 1700, a new style called opera seria began to dominate. It was, as the name implies, "serious opera," and was driven by two main forces: formulaic librettos and flamboyant singers.

The men who wrote opera seria texts — librettists such as Pietro Metastasio and Apostolo Zeno — were concerned with order, dignity and tragedy. They purged almost all of the comic elements opera had naturally absorbed and wrote stories that were serious in tone and clear in structure. Typically, conflicts between lovers or authority figures (or both) would be resolved not by some mythological god swooping in at the last minute, but by a benevolent, morally upstanding ruler.

Metastasio had a near monopoly on these tales. His 60-some libretti engendered almost 1000 operas, written by countless composers over several generations.

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(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

We've tackled terms, vocal ranges and some tricks of the opera trade in this series so far. But now it's time for a little history. We'll track some of opera's evolution over the past 400 years, beginning with its creation.

Those opera adversaries who slam the music for its elitist and Eurocentric associations are actually pretty close to getting the birth of opera right. Intellectuals, scholars and amateur musicians from Florence, Italy dreamt up the idea of opera in the last decade of the 16th century.

Unlike some art forms that took generations to morph into the next big thing, opera was invented in one place, at one time by a specific group (or two) of people. The Camerata, which included Galileo Galilei's father, held meetings at the salon of a Florentine count. The group argued over and experimented with new combinations of drama, song and music based on their study of the ancient Greeks.

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(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

From basics like speed limits to STOP, YIELD and KEEP RIGHT, traffic signs tell us how to navigate the road ahead. The same is true for opera singers. Their roadmap is the composer's score, and in it lie plenty of explicit directions (usually in Italian) on how to drive a voice or any other instrument through any given stretch of music.

This week, buckle up for a brief tour past a few of the dozens and dozens of musical road signs, with examples from some of opera's greatest chauffeurs.

Have a bit of operatic jargon that confuses or delights? Let us know.

(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

It happens every day. You're at the opera and the know-it-all next to you starts analyzing arias, cataloging cabalettas and generally running on about recitatives. You gulp your champagne with equal measures of disgust and shame.

If you only knew what the oaf was pontificating about, you could call his bluff on buzzwords from da capo arias to ariosos. For such occasions, a little operatic ammunition — in the form of jargon-busting — is necessary.

This week, a few words on the basic song unit of opera — the aria.

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(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

We've been descending though the vocal ranges over the past few weeks, from soprano and mezzo down to tenor and baritone. We've finally landed in the basement of the singing structure — the bass. And like the other voices, the basses are divided into types based on size, tone color and repertoire that fits each one best.

As for the range itself, our subterranean serenaders can usually extend up to the F above middle C and sink as low as the second C below middle C.

Before the advent of opera in about 1600, it seems there was little use for the bass voice. The florid, polyphonic music of the 13th and early 14th centuries was fixated on the tenor range for the cantus firmus or "fixed melody." That slowly changed as composers like Johannes Ockeghem began beefing up their harmonies by writing multiple lines for the lowest voices. In the last quarter of the 16th century, basses were finally getting some respect, and by the time opera was born good basses were in demand.

Read More And Hear the Basses Rumble

(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

Over the past few weeks in this series of posts, we've been descending down the vocal ranges from soprano to mezzo-soprano to tenor and now, the baritone — which lies below the tenor but above the bass. Baritones sing from roughly the second A below middle C to the G above middle C.

Pity the poor baritones. In opera at least, the word (from the Greek barytonos, meaning deep-sounding) was not even used until the 19th century. All the low-lying roles — be they in the baritone or bass range — seemed to be pigeonholed together. Another complaint is that baritones rarely get to play the hero — that's left up to the tenor — which means they almost never get the girl at the end. Instead, they're typecast as villains (Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca), buffoons (Papageno in Mozart's Magic Flute) fathers (the title character of Verdi's Rigoletto) or afflicted authority figures (Wotan in Wagner's Ring cycle).

But that doesn't mean these roles weren't plum, and that few others were available. Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti wrote meaty roles for baritones. Yet Verdi expanded the dramatic scope of the baritone role. With complex title roles in Macbeth, Simon Boccanegra, Rigoletto and Falstaff, among other characters, Verdi breathed new life into the vocal range, demanding better acting and pushing voices higher and louder to match the enlarging orchestras. And the 20th century produced more meaty characters for baritones to inhabit, such as the lead roles of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Bernstein's Mass and John Adams' Nixon in China.

Read More And Hear The Baritones Bellow

(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

In the opera world, when it comes to male singers, the tenor is the big star — think Pavarotti and Domingo. They get to play kings, heroes, swashbuckling lovers and high-maintenance romantics. They also get to sing the high notes, with a range generally from C below middle C on the bottom, and up two octaves to the so-called "high C." But tenors didn't always hog the limelight with their pinging notes and plum roles.

First, a quick history lesson on the word itself, which comes from the Latin tenere, or "to hold." And that explains the importance, early on, of the tenor line (or register) holding firm in comparison to the other vocal lines in polyphonic vocal music of the late medieval and Renaissance eras. The tenor part acted as a musical spine, a compositional foundation, even in non-vocal works.

The idea of the tenor might have been important in old church music, but that status did not immediately transfer to opera when it was invented around 1600. There were a few significant tenor roles from opera's earliest important composers, like Monteverdi and Caccini, but as musical tastes shifted, the powerful, ethereal, higher-flying voices of the castratos began to dominate. Composers from Handel through Mozart wrote starring roles for these surgically altered singers, who became the rock stars of the 1700s.

Read More And Hear The Tenors Belt It Out

(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

Last week we scaled the heights of the highest vocal range, the soprano. Today, let's take one step down the vocal ladder. In the opera house, we tend to call them mezzo-sopranos, but there are many ways, it turns out, to refer to singers in the second-highest range, along with a broad array of classifications between various mezzos, altos and contraltos.

In terms of range, think of the mezzo-soprano as in the middle (mezzo, in Italian) of the soprano and the contralto — roughly singing from the A below middle C and up at least two octaves. Although the distinction between the two began in the mid-1700s, it wasn't until the 19th century that composers began thinking of the mezzo in terms of specific types of roles. Mezzos, because of their naturally lower, often darker-hued voices, were often cast as older characters: maids and confidants (Amelia in Verdi's Otello), nurses (Filippevna in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin), rivals (Amneris in Verdi's Aida), or sometimes even young men (so-called "pants roles" like Cherubino in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro).

The terms alto and contralto are sometimes used interchangeably but it's not that simple. Alto, strictly speaking, refers to the vocal range one rung higher than a tenor. The term goes back to the 16th century, when alto parts in church music were sung only by men — either high tenors, falsetto singers (counter-tenors), boys, or castrati (those men who were surgically "altered" such that their voices never dropped at puberty). We also think of altos as the lower-voiced women in the church choir.

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(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

Voices are as individual as the people they belong to, yet the opera world has created convenient pigeonholes for categorizing them. You've got your main groupings — sopranos, mezzos, tenors, baritones and basses — but there's more to it than that. In the next few installments of this series, we'll divide and subdivide within those groups so you'll be able to tell your basso buffo from your basso profondo.

Let's start with the sopranos, the highest singers, who in general have a range from around the A below middle C and up a couple of octaves. These days we think of the soprano as the star, the temperamental diva who inspires countless jokes like: How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: One. She holds the bulb and the world revolves around her.

But sopranos weren't always the prima donnas of the vocal world. There was a time when composers didn't write much music for women to sing. The highest notes were sung by either high tenors or men singing in falsetto. And females were, for a long stretch, not allowed to sing in church. But women from noble families began taking up music, and by the time opera was invented — around 1600 — women singers, sopranos especially, were already attaining diva-like status.

Read More And Hear Some Great Sopranos