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Best opera music11/11/2022 ![]() ![]() #Best opera music fullIn the aria, the title clown has just discovered his wife is cheating on him, but must put on his make-up, and pretend to be care-free enough to make a circus full of people laugh. Composed by Ruggero Leoncavallo, "Vesti la Giubba" is arguably one of the darkest, and most melancholic pieces of popular opera music. ![]() "Pagliacci" is one of two primary examples of opera verismo, a style of short, psychologically-realistic opera that emphasizes then-contemporary settings and situations (the other popular example is "Cavalleria Rusticana," another hour-long opera that is almost always performed with "Pagliacci"). Whenever a fascistic villain is on the attack, there's a chance you'll hear it, even if the film is a comedy like " The Blues Brothers," the climax of which finds Henry Gibson's neo-Nazi pursuing Jake and Elwood Blues. Despite the female voices, "Ride of the Valkyries" is a song that is gender-coded as masculine, partly because many laypeople associate Wagner with the Nazis there's certainly a touch of this thinking in the way "Valkyries" is used in "Apocalypse Now," as backing for a sequence in which American helicopters destroy a Vietnamese village. This piece is tellingly treated as an instrumental piece, partly because the women singers are constantly raising the pitch of their voices, and this song is a war-cry. In many films, the fact that "Ride of the Valkyries" is about a group of women warriors (the Valkyrie) who are boasting about their imminent martial victory is incidental to the music's use. While many people associate this famous aria with " Apocalypse Now" and the smell of napalm in the morning, this exultant, soaring anthem can be found in everything from Federico Fellini's " 8 1/2" to John Waters's "Mondo Trasho." In this scene from "The Sum of All Fears," a diplomat's car blows up as "Nessun Dorma" winds down.Ģ.) "Ride of the Valkyries," from "Die Walküre" It just sounds big, and climactic: whoever is on screen will win, will succeed, will destroy, will love, etc. At the same time, the aria's triumphal tone is also often used in films to signify a dramatic end to something. Sung by a tenor and made popular by Luciano Pavarotti, "Nessun Dorma" is used wherever film characters need a quick way of expressing ardent romantic feelings since the aria builds in intensity until it concludes with the orchestra taking the singer's place, booming and swelling and swelling and booming. ![]() In "Nessun Dorma," brash Prince Calaf claims he will do what no other man has done by melting the heart of chilly Turandot, a cruel leader who refuses to marry anyone but the man who can answer her three Sphinx-like riddles. Here are the top five most-used arias, according to my own very subjective viewing experience, with some commentary about the different films it's been used in, and what the filmmakers might have seen in it.įor many people, an "operatic" narrative is one that involves one of three types of women: a weak-kneed victim of consumption, a firebrand flirt, or an ice-queen villainess. Why that opera, though? Why that aria, and not another one that also connotes imminent seduction? Why has "Turandot" or any other opera with one or two instantly-recognizable arias become a signifier for bombastic or hyper-stylized emotions? What are the most popular pieces of opera music, and how are they used in films, a currently popular art form? Afterward, I jokingly tweeted: "If you're going to an opera in a spy thriller, it's almost always Turandot." I wrote that because " The Sum of All Fears," another American spy-thriller, uses "Nessun Dorma" in a climactic scene. While four people either try to kill or not kill an important politician, performers sing "Nessun Dorma," a beautiful aria that is also one of the most ubiquitously quoted pieces of music composed by Puccini. ![]() In the spy thriller "Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation," Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt interferes with an assassination attempt that goes down at a live performance of "Turandot," Giacomo Puccini's final opera. ![]()
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