Growing out of the listening/watching thread, but I didn't want to take it TOO far off-topic...
...here's a quick trivia question for you: who are the most succesful 20th and 21st century opera composers?
So, operabase has a statistics function, and for my own curiosity I set about making a list of composers from this time period, in order how many performances of their operas had been recorded between 2004 (when their records begin) and 2019.
This relies on the companies submitting data, and in particular companies that see themselves as purely in the 'musical theatre' business (i.e. the West End and Broadway) don't get involved - so 'Hamilton' doesn't feature in the stats (yet), for instance, and some musicals will be considerably undercounted. However, the distortion is probably not as great as you might think - the number of west end/broadway theatres is dwarfed by the number of opera companies (there's something like 100 in the UK alone), and the big theatres are generally pretty bad at reviving old works, which you're more likely to find put on by an opera company than by a dedicated "musicals" theatre. So 'musicals' writers are still well-represented here. Some musicals and operettas (eg Gilbert and Sullivan!) also get a lot of amateur performances, which of course aren't counted here.
I got bored after the first 75. But please, have a guess... I've divided it into three groups - composers most known for work between 1900 and the war; composers most known for work between the war and 2000; and composers most known for work between 2000 and now.
Here's 35 composers from the first period. Can you a) guess them in advance, and b) recognise their names or think of any opera they wrote?
I've given the number of performances for the top three; and then every time we drop under a 1,000 threshold; and then under 500, 400, 300, and 200. I've put a few famous opera composers from earlier eras in brackets for context and comparison.
There's a couple of names there that even people who don't listen to classical music should recognise!
And here's 30 from the second half of the century:
For those who aren't classical fans: can you name works by Loewe, Lloyd Webber, Sondheim, Rodgers, Bock, Herman, Wildhorn, Leigh, Kander and Styne?
And finally, nine from the last twenty years:
What did I learn from all this? Not a lot. Here's a couple of interesting things, though:
- it's easy for non-Germans to underestimate the sheer volume of German opera - Germany is the centre of the modern opera world. As a result, it's easy to underestimate the success of German and central european light opera composers, who may be little heard in the UK or US, but who a constantly replayed in Germany. I'd heard of Kálmán and Die Csárdásfuerstin, but I'd never even heard of Benatzky or Abraham (who wrote operas with delightful titles like "Roxy and the Wonderteam"). The same is true to a lesser extent of the Spanish zarzuelistas.
- nobody likes modern opera. In particular, I was shocked by the low placement of Saariaho, whose
L'amour de loin is constantly touted as one of the defining works of the genre - and yet she's performed less often than Salieri, a man virtually synonymous with being forgotten!
- kudos to Evers and Naske, who don't even have wikipedia entries (in English - obviously, German wikipedia has a lot more opera entries!), but who are following the Engelbert Humperdinck route to fame, by writing works specifically for children.
- I didn't even know Nino Rota wrote opera! (he's the guy who wrote the music for The Godfather).
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On a sombre note: by an unpleasant coincidence, not one but two of these composers were murdered at Auschwitz. Hans Krása wrote two operas, but he's best known for
Brundibár, a children's opera written shortly before his arrest, and famously first performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Viktor Ullman, also at Theresienstadt, was less fortunate: his <i>The Emperor of Atlantis</i> was actually written in Theresienstadt, and was due to be performed there, but the concentration camp guards at the last moment banned the performance, because they were worried it might harbour a degree of coded criticism of the government (it's about a man world-emperor who declares a permanent war, but offends Death, who refuses to let anybody die until the emperor sacrifices his own life; the Nazis worried that the emperor might be read as an analogue for Hitler, and that this might encourage covert anti-Hitler sentiments among the concentration camp inmates).
As a result, it wasn't performed until 1975, when Ullman helpfully revealed some important lost details of the score through the medium of... well, a medium [Rosemary Brown, who was very kind to accept Ullman's dictation, given that she spent the whole decade incredibly busy transmitting new music from Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, etc...]. Its popularity has only started to spread since the late 90s, when a new, less metaphysically-assisted but more academically robust score was assembled.
Ironically, a similar late rediscovery has also occured in the case of Moise Wainberg; ironically, because although he wasn't in a concentration camp himself, his most famous opera is about Auschwitz. Wainberg's problem was instead Stalin - although he survived (narrowly - only Stalin's death while Wainberg was under arrest saved him), his music was largely forgotted until the 21st century...