Opera Crossword Puzzle for Kids

Opera is a drama set to music. An opera is like a play in which everything is sung instead of spoken. Operas are usually performed in opera houses. The singers who sing and act out the story are on the stage, and the orchestra is in front of the stage but lower down, in the orchestra pit, so that the audience can see the stage.

Musical numbers of an opera

An opera is normally divided into two, three, four or even five acts. In older operas the music was mostly recitative and arias. During the recitative things would happen in the story. The aria was a song for a solo singer, a setting of a lyric. As well as recitative and aria there would be choruses. The chorus were a group of singers who sing in the crowd scenes. The opera would start with an overture for the orchestra. The overture would usually include tunes that are going to be heard later in the opera.

In operas from the 19th century onwards there is often little or no difference between recitative and aria. Composers like Wagner wanted to get away from operas which had lots of separate arias in which the singers showed off, with the audience clapping loudly after each one. He wanted continuous music so that the mood would not be broken.

Sometimes operas have a lot of dancing in them. French opera especially would often have one act which was full of dances.

Types of opera

Opéra bouffe (French) or Opera buffa (Italian) is comic opera. The story is very light-hearted and funny.

Opéra comique is a French term for opera which has some spoken words. Surprisingly it does not mean a “comic” opera. An opera like Carmen, which is a tragedy, is still an opéra comique due to the fact that it uses spoken dialogues instead of recitatives.

Singspiel is a German term for a type of opera with lots of magic and fantasy in the story. There were spoken words between the songs. Mozart’s Magic Flute is an example.

Operetta is a short opera which is light-hearted and usually has some spoken words.

The singers

Opera singers have to have powerful voices as well as a good technique. Most opera houses are very big, and the singers need to be heard at the back. They also need to be good at acting. They need to be able to learn their music quickly and to sing from memory. It is a help to be good at languages because operas are often in Italian, German, French, English or Russian etc. Some opera companies, like the English National Opera, sing their operas in English. Others, like the Royal Opera House, sing operas in whatever language they were composed in. Translations are printed on a screen above the front of the stage ("surtitles") so that the audience can understand what is being sung.

Although singers train to get a wide range (good top and bottom notes) they cannot be expected to sing any role in their voice range. For example: some sopranos may have big, dramatic voices, suitable for parts like Tosca in Puccini’s opera Tosca. Some may have a very light and high voice, called “coloratura”, suitable for parts like the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Some may have a medium range, called mezzo-soprano, suitable for parts like Carmen in Bizet’s opera Carmen.

Very often in opera the heroine is a soprano and the hero is a tenor. Basses may often have the part of a powerful king, or he may be the bad guy.

Operatic conventions

The 18th century lexicographer and critic Dr Johnson described opera as an “exotic and irrational entertainment”. By “exotic” he meant that it came from a foreign country (which in those days was true: all opera at the time came from Italy). By “irrational” he meant that the things which happened in the stories were strange and not like real life. A play can be like real life, but an opera is being sung, so things are not going to happen like they normally do in real life. A singer might be singing “I must go, I must go!” and he may stand on the stage and sing this for several minutes before at last he goes! A singer may be pretending to die, and will sing a beautiful song before he or she finally dies. These things are “conventions”, which means that they are a kind of habit we have to accept when watching and listening to opera. Another convention of earlier operas was to have the part of young men sung by women. This is sometimes called a breeches role or trouser role. They are often small parts such as page boys, or teenagers who flirt with older women, such as the part of Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro or Oktavian in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. It should be remembered that in the 18th century it was usual for the main female part to be sung by a man who was a castrato.

There are lots of famous operas, and the best ones have some of the greatest music ever written. The music could not have been written like that if it had not been written for opera. For example: Mozart is very clever at writing music where maybe six people are all singing different things at once because they all have different ideas about the situation in the story.

The history of opera

One of the first operas ever written was Ordo Virtutum by Hildegard of Bingen. Ordo Virtutum (Latin for Order of the Virtues) is an allegorical morality play, or liturgical drama, composed c. 1151, during the construction and relocation of Bingen's Abbey at Rupertsberg. It is the earliest morality play by more than a century, and the only Medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both the text and the music.

A short version of Ordo Virtutum without music appears at the end of Scivias, Hildegard's most famous account of her visions. It is also included in some manuscripts of the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum ("Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations"), a cycle of more than 70 liturgical songs. It may have been performed by the convent nuns at the dedication of the St. Rupertsberg church in 1152 or possibly before the Mass for the Consecration of Virgins at the convent.

The first Baroque opera ever written was performed in 1597 in Florence in Italy. It was called Dafne and the composer was Jacopo Peri. This opera is now lost, but three years later, in 1600, he worked together with another composer called Giulio Caccini to write an opera called Euridice. The music for this still exists. It was nearly all recitative. This kind of writing was new, but if opera was to tell a story it was important to have a solo voice singing words that could be heard. They were trying to produce something like an ancient Greek tragedy. It was performed at a kind of club, called “camerata”, for intellectual (clever) people to a small audience. It was not great music, but the amazing thing was that there was a composer of genius around. His name was Claudio Monteverdi, and only seven years later, in 1607, he wrote the first really good opera: Orfeo, which was produced in Mantua. Monteverdi must have realized that opera had the possibilities of putting poetry, music, scenery and acting all together. He took the kind of songs that were popular at the time and joined them with speaking or recitative. Later in life he joined these so that the music flowed more dramatically.

In 1637 the first public opera house was opened in Venice. Soon lots of theatres in Italy started to produce operas. The stories were usually about ancient times, like the Roman Empire or Greek myths. They started to put in comic (funny) bits to make people laugh. Soon there was opera in Paris, Vienna, Hamburg and in the small courts of Germany which in those days was lots of little countries, each with their own prince who ruled and who kept musicians at court. The composers who are best remembered today include Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) who was an Italian who moved to France and wrote operas for the French king, and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) who was a German who moved to England and wrote operas for the opera houses in London. In Italy there were composers like Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) who had been a choirboy in Monteverdi’s church choir in Venice, and Alessandro Scarlatti 1660-1725 who lived in Naples.

During this period, known as the Baroque period, the opera was an entertainment for the upper classes who went to the opera to be seen in public. Opera was a social occasion where you could meet people and talk, even during the music. Both the singers and the audience behaved in ways that we would think were bad manners.

Text adapted from the Simple English Wikipedia article “Opera” (revision 10471890, 2025-08-22), authors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.