The history of opera from Mozart to Puccini. Experience the history of opera with interesting facts and great music examples.
While Verdi dominated the opera scene in Italy, Richard Wagner changed the opera world in the north forever. Listen to this episode: Wagner, the revolutionary.
and his subsequent works, Wagner adopted the use of leitmotifs, which are recurring themes or harmonic progressions. They musically denote an action, object, emotion, character, or other subject mentioned in the text or presented onstage. Wagner referred to them in “Opera and Drama” as “guides-to-feeling”, describing how they could be used to inform the listener of a musical or dramatic subtext to the action onstage in the same way as a Greek chorus did for the theatre of ancient Greece. Although other composers before Wagner had already used similar techniques, the