How to Write a Traditional Opera

I am in the process of writing an opera.  The problem one faces when writing an opera is determining whether one wants the opera to be traditional, or successful.  I have many ideas on this subject and today I will focus on the factors one should consider when writing a traditional opera.  I will then follow up with a lesson on how to write a successful opera.  Let’s begin.

1) It Should be Written By Mozart or Puccini
This is perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome, as I am assuming that you are hoping for the opera you are writing to be written by yourself.  Also, Mozart and Verdi are dead.  The easiest way to fix this is to legally change your name.  That way, when you publish your finished work, you can truthfully say “A New Opera By Mozart!” or “World Premiere Of Never Heard Puccini Opera!” on your posters.  If you don’t want to pay the fee for having your name legally changed, you can get around this by writing under a “pen name.”  When possible, you should also try and name your opera “La Boheme.”

2) It Should Be as Long as Possible
A common newbie mistake among opera composers is failing to produce works longer than three hours.  Opera is expensive, and when people buy tickets, they expect to be entertained for at least four or five hours.  Longer if at all possible.  Traditional opera composers use a trick called “theme and variations,” and you can too!  This simply means that when you have run out of ideas for music, simply take some of the music you have already written and use it again!  Just change a little bit, like use different words, and no one will ever notice!  The longer your opera is, the more traditional it will be.  Just ask Wagner!  When he wrote “Lord of the Ring Cycle” he made it so long that it is statistically impossible to experience all of it in one average lifetime.  This is why many opera companies do the abridged version of this epic masterpiece.  You will often hear the abridged version referred to as “Gianni Schicchi” and it compresses all of Wager’s operas into 45 minutes!

3) Everyone Should Die
If any of your characters are still alive at the end of the opera, you are not doing it right.  This traditional stems from the cautionary tale of one Jack Rossini.  He wrote an opera called “The Barber of Seville” (later remade into the movie “Sweeny Todd”) in 1816, in which he failed to kill off all of the characters at the end.  Think, then, how horrified he was, when just a few years later, in 1786, Mr. Wolf Mozart wrote an unauthorized sequel called “The Marriage of Figaro.”  The opera world never fully recovered from this scandal, and to prevent such acts from ever occurring again, it is now traditional to erase any hopes of a sequel with the deaths of all major characters.  If you have written yourself into a corner and can’t think of any way for your character to die, just have them kill themselves.  It’s the traditional thing to do.

4) It Should Not Be in English
So many American composers these days are writing operas in English.  What a joke!  Everyone knows that traditional operas are not written in English.  Mostly they are written in Italian, like “Rigoletto” and “Cosi fan tutte,” and occasionally we let one slide in German (Die Zauberflöte) or French (La Cage aux Folles), but if you write an opera in English, people will know what you are saying, and they might discover that you don’t really know how to write an opera, and that is the last thing you want.  The best thing to do, really, is write either in a language that most people cannot speak, like Votic, or else just make up your own language.

5) You Should Have Written it a Long Time Ago
My last, and most important point is this: All of the good traditional songs have already been written.  You should have started writing your traditional opera about 250 years ago, and now it is too late.  These days anything you write will be “modern opera” and will include things like someone hitting a cymbal as they dip it in and out of a bucket of water.  There are only 12 notes and they can only go together so many ways.  Face it, you will never write a traditional opera.  But there is still hope!  You can still write a successful opera.  More on that tomorrow.