Recently, I went to Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, NJ to attend The Metro Lyric Opera “Barber of Seville”. It was my first experience attending a live opera. It was very interesting and was much more than I had expected. I had heard about opera before and also watched it on television once or twice, but watching the live performance of the artists was more interesting and enjoyable. One thing that helped me enjoy the opera was the knowledge I gained about opera by reading my text book and the lessons given by the instructor in class.
Opera has an interesting background history, with being found almost a century and a half before the classical period (Age of Enlightment). Many composers have written opera and down the line changes have occurred and edits made by the composers to the main idea of opera, for example presenting of music along the drama. In the beginning opera use to be more of a drama than anything else but then along the line text music and dance was added to make it more appealing to the eyes and ears of the audience. In the most cases opera are performed in foreign languages rather than English, which is sometimes an obstacle of attracting adequate amount of a crowd. People think that as it is in a fo
reign language it may not be interesting to watch or see, so this assumption holds back a lot of the people. But what I found appealing was that on the top of the stage English translation was being given to make it easier for people to understand what the characters were saying or singing. In the beginning I felt the same way that I would not be able to understand Italian but the translation was quite helpful. It does make sen~e to me that it may be more difficult to present the same opera in English because of the theme and the idea may not be as appealing as in the original language. With the
translation and the orchestral music playing along was a great deal in helping me understand what was going on at that particular moment.
Iwould also like to appraise the staging system in the opera. The background was very attractive and appealing to the eyes and did look like the real places of the old time. The background was on curtains which were changed according to the scene. The costumes of the characters were also quite impressive and were according to their characters and the time they were from. Everything did seem perfect and even the lighting and space to perform acts or dance was adequate.
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