Scary opera music full#

Music’s role in a world of discord is to restore a sense of harmony. The Queen of the Night’s stratospheric, otherworldly coloratura sets the heart racing with alarm in contrast, Zorastro’s deep, calm, almost soporific arias draw us back into a world of order and reason.

In Mozart’s The Magic Flute, opposing forces of darkness and light are expressed in the musical extremes of the writing for voice.

Scary opera music full#

How did the supernatural world influence opera?įor Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century, the supernatural world was full of irrational elements that held humanity back in the pursuit of a progressive, morally driven world. In his 2007 production of Macbeth, Richard Jones memorably portrayed them as working-class single mothers living in a trailer park, bursting out of their caravans to scare the living daylights out of a mild-mannered Glyndebourne audience. For modern stage directors, Verdi’s witches have provided fodder for ironic commentaries on what constitutes the notion of terror among an opera-loving public. The late Verdi scholar Julian Budden wrote that the jaunty music in the first Witches’ Chorus ‘does not add up to anything very terrifying’ though it ‘at least captures the essentially childish malice of the witches in the play’. Verdi himself wanted the Witches to appear ‘trivial, yet extravagant and original,’ but many commentators have regarded them as a failure to capture the fantastical and fatalistic atmosphere of Shakespeare’s apparitions. In a departure from Shakespeare’s Three Weird Sisters, Verdi has a large female chorus of witches divided into three parts, singing music that veers from the grotesque to the ribald. Perhaps the most famous of all operatic witches are those that appear in Verdi’s Macbeth.

In Rossini’s Armida, the protagonist is an infidel temptress who uses magic to try to steer the knight Rinaldo away from his Christian mission in the Crusades. Witches and sorcerers continued to fascinate composers into the 19th century. Handel’s opera Alcina warns of the malignant effects of the supernatural on Enlightenment ideals: luring men to her island, the eponymous sorceress turns them into beasts. In Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the witches who lure Aeneas away from Carthage represent what was regarded in 17th-century England as the pernicious, destabilising influence of Roman Catholicism.