Opera in the House

USA Weekend, Where on the Web, March 9, 2003

Anyone who's tried to figure out song lyrics has had a Ramona Quimby moment. The children's book character became fascinated with the phrase "dawnzer lee light" in "The Star-Spangled Banner", not realizing the words were actually "dawn's early light." Even more difficult than figuring out lyrics in one's own language, however, is figuring out those in another language, as any opera lover can attest. Now the Web can help you sing along -- and understand the plot -- when Plácido Domingo comes to town.

OperaGlass at opera.stanford.edu is the antithesis of a Franco Zeffirelli set: spare and unostentatious. But don't mistake simplicity for deficiency. The site takes what normally would be stacks of information and organizes it all more neatly than Melvil Dewey could. Although there's no search function, the site's alphabetical lists make it easy to find the plots, full lyrics and performance histories of most popular operas. You also could spend a good portion of your life skimming the index of more than 2,600 opera composers; it includes the titles of each one's works, and collectively, there are more than 15,000. Other indexes include the homepages of contemporary opera luminaries and fan pages.

If getting your opera information from a Stanford research scientist seems counterintuitive, check out OperaAmerica.org and OperaWorld.com, two sites run by Opera America that interlink with each other. Both sites publish up-to-the-minute contemporary opera news. The Broadcast Booth lists upcoming opera radio broadcasts, and a comprehensive search function finds schedules for opera performances from Aalborg, Denmark, to Zanesville, Ohio. Opera America also has information for opera professionals, but membership is required to access it.

These days, it can be challenging to prefer Mozart over Mos Def. Most people would rather discuss The Lord of the Rings than Wagner's Ring Cycle. But at least online, you can find information on Aida from people who know it's not just a Broadway musical.

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