Read on to discover the operatic origins of today's stage musicals...
Is there really that much difference between opera and musicals?
Immediately after the end of World War II, US Army forces marched into Bayreuth, shrine of Wagner’s operas and a beloved hang-out of Adolf Hitler. The famous Festspielhaus was repurposed and given over to various populist entertainments including musical revues – a calculated poke in the eye for Hitler’s ideal of the master artform for the master race. Yet, ignoring for a moment the Nazis’ twisted artistic logic, is there really such a vast gap between the world of opera and the world of what revues evolved into – namely, musical theatre? With English National Opera performing My Fair Lady in 2022, to say nothing of John Wilson’s recording of Oklahoma! scooping BBC Music Magazine’s 2024 Opera Award, it’s a question worth asking.
In fact, if opera is ‘high art’ (not always) and musicals are ‘low art’ (not at all), the road that connects them is virtually flat, and well travelled. After all, what makes Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a piece of 18th-century Viennese music-hall populism, combining speech, music and movement, not a musical of its day? It happens to be a sublime masterpiece, but then so is My Fair Lady. Bizet’s Carmen was judged to be so close to a musical that it was rejigged by orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to become one in 1943, Carmen Jones.
Intertwined art forms
Even the most intellectual of composers haven’t kept their distance – Stravinksy wrote a ballet sequence for a 1944 Broadway revue, The Seven Lively Arts. William Schuman, before becoming a byword for uber-serious academia, penned popular songs with future musicals king Frank Loesser. Zipping forward a few decades, in 2005 Thomas Meehan, the irrepressible script writer for Annie, Hairspray and The Producers, turned librettist for Lorin Maazel’s opera 1984. Meanwhile, 2003’s foul-mouthed, formally-constructed Jerry Springer: The Opera was either a musical that utilised the ennobling power of operatic form, or the other way round (or something).
Opera and musicals... they evolved from the same place
Although the relationship between opera and musicals has always been close, few would argue that they are the same thing. Does Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot inhabit the same world as Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (both 1960)? How about 1967’s counter-culture rock-musical Hair and the previous year’s big Metropolitan Opera premiere, Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra? Do 2017’s SIX and Girls Of The Golden West by John Adams share any DNA at all? I mean, at all?
That last example is perhaps a mischievous one, as the pop-concert antics of SIX feel about as removed from the opera world as you can get, whereas some recent hit musicals – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton with its sweeping history-charting heroics, or Anaïs Mitchell’s spin on the Orpheus myth Hadestown – certainly have more of the whiff of the opera stage about them.
A story told through acting and music
Yet it all evolved from the same places. Opera (or its lighter sibling operetta, which simply places more emphasis on speech alongside the music and tends more towards comedy) gave birth to the musical, establishing what we recognise as the standard musical-theatrical experience: a long-form story, told dramatically through acting and music, and acting through the music; musicians to underscore; often a strong choreographed element; and other theatrical trappings such as sets, lighting and sound design (once, just acoustics).
But opera wasn’t the only parent. Musicals also sprang from revues – variety evenings with self-contained musical numbers that were barely connected, if at all. In America, there was a strong vaudeville strain – the British equivalent was music hall. Then came Oscar Hammerstein II who, together with Jerome Kern and Show Boat (1927), reforged a night on Broadway as a cohesive, rolling, operatic experience with story and structure to the fore – and he then did it again in 1943, this time in the company of Richard Rodgers, with 1943’s Oklahoma!.
The rise of the musical
Musicals never looked back. Sometimes they nestle closer to opera, as with George Gershwin’s ‘folk opera’ Porgy And Bess, Leonard Bernstein’s operetta-like Candide, ‘rock operas’ of the 1970’s like Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell or Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, or the mega-hit through-sung musicals of the 1980s and early ’90s (Lloyd Webber’s Evita, Cats and Phantom of the Opera, or Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Les Misérables and Miss Saigon). At other times, like a teenager ashamed to be seen with their parents, they’ve pushed away.
Yet for musical theatre and operetta historian Kurt Gänzl, the connection is always there. ‘The relationship between opera and the modern-day so-called musical is rather like one of second cousins twice removed,’ he says, ‘and the family tree includes a good few illegitimate relations and misfits. Anything put on a stage, having both words and music, belongs somewhere on that family tree. Even if distantly.’
For Gänzl, even a ‘pop catalogue’ show such as Abba-fest Mamma Mia! is included: ‘There were 18th-century jukebox musicals.’ He cites John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Kane O’Hara’s Midas – both operatic hits which used popular songs of their day – and throws in for good measure 1916’s Das Dreimäderlhaus (House Of The Three Girls), a Viennese operetta which repurposes the music of Schubert to tell a romantic story and was an enormous international hit around the world, including in London and New York – very Mamma Mia! indeed!
Which comes first? Music or the plot?
For Jason Robert Brown, composer-lyricist both of shows that seem highly operatic, such as Parade, and others less so, like Mr Saturday Night, there is a crucial difference. ‘A musical and an opera are both doing the same thing, telling a story with music,’ says classically trained Brown. ‘But the opera world started with the music itself, whereas the theatre came at it from a more dramatic place – what if we take this plot and put music and add songs to it, whereas opera feels like, “What can I apply my music to?”’
As for the ‘classic era’ composers – the Cole Porters, Irving Berlins and Lerner and Loewes, whose shows most closely resemble operettas – Brown’s take is fascinating. ‘In the mid-20th century there were a lot of composers who had training in Western classical music and who aspired to the respectability that was given to high art forms like opera, also ballet, and incorporated elements of those into musical theatre. And the producers were happy because it could help bring the opera crowds to their shows.’
The same basic structure
And yet, I argue, even the new-wave musicals of the 1960s and ’70s, like the rocking Hair or Stephen Sondheim’s poppy Company, kept the same basic structure – an orchestral core, the same kinds of acoustic dynamics, voices that would blend well with the orchestra, and so on.
‘The similarities are mostly accounted for by the venues themselves,’ Brown responds. ‘From 1945 through around 1987 you had an open pit, full of musicians. And so, in order to do your musical you had to utilise that pit with those musicians, also to satisfy the union requirements! So even the groundbreaking A Chorus Line, which in a lot of ways is hard to connect back to operatic tradition, still had to hire those musicians. Plus, you had orchestrators versed in classical work.’
Musicals have become more flexible
For Brown, Sondheim and Lloyd Webber each represented a turning-point. ‘Sondheim was at the end of a line; Lloyd Webber was at the beginning of a line. Sondheim, who went to study with classical composer Milton Babbitt, loved classical music and brought that into his writing so that when he would write rock stuff it was always, quote-unquote, rock treated through a classical lens. Lloyd Webber is the opposite, well versed in classical through his composer father, but wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll guy. By the time you get to Phantom, with its melding of a mature musical voice, I still hear that show as a classical piece written by a rock guy, whereas Sondheim’s Company is a rock-style piece written by a classically trained guy.’
In other words, musicals became more flexible – and, once the orchestras’ unions lost their fight to maintain a large minimum number of players, heavily amplified electronic music became the norm. ‘Now people are used to hearing big, heavy beats. You’ve also got to project the lyrics over that, which requires a different kind of vocal production.’
Can you sing in both operas and musicals?
Not always, perhaps. Scarlett Strallen, whose leading-lady career has encompassed classic-era shows such as She Loves Me and Candide (and who stars in John Wilson’s forthcoming My Fair Lady recording) as well as more modern musicals like A Chorus Line, approaches learning every role in the same – classically informed – way. ‘I was a ballet dancer first,’ she says, ‘and it’s the same classical method for singing as for dancing. You take tiny chunks at a time – just as a dancer studies for hours to get the right body shape. As one of my teachers would say, “Make the mould before the gold.”’
Strallen has starred in Joseph Papp’s famous Broadway revisioning of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. ‘I went through it phrase by phrase, making painstakingly slow progress – you can spend three days on a single phrase. Every song is the same at heart – you need to understand how it builds, where’s the peak and why, and why does the character need to express herself in that way.’ And, she adds, there’s also the aspect of vocal health – a Broadway performer needs technique and control, as opera singers do, in order not to destroy the voice over so many shows a week.
Directors and conductors
The process is decidedly not the same for directors, as attested by Bartlett Sher, who flits between the two worlds – currently his staging of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate is playing in the West End. ‘You don’t have any time in opera,’ he says. ‘My first time at the Met, I had two-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal, seven days on stage, one dress rehearsal and then we opened. For a musical, you typically get four to five weeks of rehearsals, ten full days of tech and four weeks of preview performances before the opening. But opera is very expensive to mount, so you must work incredibly fast!’ And the leadership dynamics in opera are different, he admits, with the conductor usually taking the lead – whereas in musicals the director is usually in charge. That leads to different creative emphases.
Has opera become too academic?
Jake Heggie, one of today’s most successful opera composers, grew up an avid musical theatre fan, and his eye-to-the-commercial choice of operatic subjects would seem a natural for any Broadway writer – Moby-Dick, Dead Man Walking, The End of the Affair. He credits musical theatre with giving him his first sense of great storytelling, especially Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. ‘Sondheim once said to me, “If you’ve got a great story, 50 per cent of your work is done.” But I found that same sense of storytelling and character development when I first saw La traviata, Tosca and Peter Grimes. And I felt the same desire to tell a story, but to explore it even more deeply through music.’
He feels that at some points in recent decades, operas became too academic, and during that period, Phantom, Les Mis and the others weren’t just influenced by operas, they actually were operas – populist opera effectively morphed, and decamped as best it could to Broadway.
Creating space for the music
Heggie’s description of the opera development process points up a clear difference. ‘A reading where people go through the libretto on its own is not useful to me. If it works without music, it’s not a good libretto. There need to be holes, places where the music will do the storytelling. Most of the great operas really work because you’re getting information from the score that is unspoken, that goes beyond words. Moments, for instance, when a voice takes its time to spin a phrase, and you are getting new emotional information, because of the way it is set and sung. In opera, you don’t need to speak the language it’s written in; you understand emotionally and that’s the key.’
We talk about those kinds of emotional spaces in operas – the hushed, eloquent reprise of the tenor aria ‘Dalla sua pace’ in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the ominous Act III cello solo in Verdi’s Otello. And, though I’ve seen musicals in languages I don’t speak, and they worked – Maury Yeston’s Titanic in Dutch! – I know what he means. But… that emotional musical power is also available to musicals.
Opera... rooted in the epic and mythic
Rachel Chavkin, director of Hadestown, agrees that atmosphere and a broad structural, almost symphonic, sense of pacing was part of ‘making something rooted in the epic and the mythic. So, if that is what is meant by operatic, totally. It was very conscious, very deliberate.’
And so, for instance, the scenes above ground are light, swift, almost pastoral, but once we get to hell, the scoring is heavier, the movement slower. That kind of power seems operatic in a primordial sense. Maybe what we mean by ‘operatic’ is just that: some long-ago instinct to combine storytelling with song. Chavkin agrees: ‘Singing is ancient, so in that way it is primeval, because as long as there have been humans, someone has been humming.’
The future of musicals
So back to that first question – are musicals and operas that far apart? Aren’t the refined histrionics of La traviata a million miles away from the cool-car-and-pop stylings of Back to the Future? ‘The musical has grown to a new place that can hold any other medium within it,’ says Bartlett Sher. ‘The source can be opera or operetta, hip hop or Huey Lewis. The good news is that theatres are still finding ways of getting people into big rooms for live entertainments with other human beings.’
So, opera is musical theatre’s root, but is it its future? As I look at the musicals, new and revived, dominating today’s stages – with their soaring ensembles, flying cars, Shakespearean riffs, torch songs, broken hearts and tickled ribs – I am reminded of a quote that fits it all perfectly. ‘The essence… is the blending of all art forms – music, drama, poetry and visual design – into a unified and powerful experience.’ The author of the quote was Giuseppe Verdi, and he was talking about opera.