Musical Journeys: Music for the stage

There are lots of different types of music for stage. It can include:

• opera
• musicals
• ballets

Composers have made music for stage, all over the world and for hundreds of years.

It can be traced back as far as Ancient Greece, where music and dance were used in stage comedies and tragedies.

Opera is a play that is set to music where everything is sung.

It was first created around AD1600 during the Baroque period.

The songs are normally accompanied by a large group of musicians playing in an orchestra.

The performers sing and act out the story on the stage. The orchestra are usually in front of the stage but lower down in the orchestra pit.

In opera, there are usually recitative, arias and choruses.

• During the recitative, the singer would tell the story quite quickly, in the rhythm of speech, over some simple musical accompaniment.
• Arias are songs for a solo singer and are much more musically interesting.
• The chorus is a group of singers who sing altogether.

There are different types of opera.

• Opera Buffa which is usually comedy opera.
• Opera Seria which is usually serious and historical or heroic.
• Opera Verismo which is about real life.
• Operetta which is a shorter, light-hearted version of opera.

Take a listen to these two short pieces of music from an opera called Carmen, composed by Georges Bizet.

Carmen is a story about love, betrayal and revenge.

You can find out more about Georges Bizet with BBC Ten Pieces.

A ballet is a dance that is performed to music.

The music accompanies the movements of the dance.

Ballet developed from dances performed in the late 1500s.

Many early ballets combined dancing with opera. However, by the 1700schoreographers were working with composers, to create ballets which told a story through just dance and music.

Ballets also use costumes and scenery for the stage.

One of the most famous ballets is called The Nutcracker, composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

It’s a fairytale story about a young girl called Clara, who is given a wooden nutcracker as a present. When the nutcracker comes to life as a handsome prince, the two have to escape the mouse king to reach the land of sweets.

Discover more about the Nutcracker and Tchiakovsky with BBC Ten Pieces.

A musical is quite like an opera in that it has music, song and dance. The difference, is that musicals usually have speaking parts too.

During the 19th Century, some European composers were experimenting with a style of music called comic opera.

This led to early versions of musical theatre, for example HMS Pinafore and The Mikado by English composers Gilbert and Sullivan.

These shows were made for family audiences and showed how music, song and spoken parts, could work together to tell a theatrical story.

The 20th Century brought a golden age for musical theatre, with composers bringing together all aspects of modern musical theatre: music, dance, song and spoken dialogue.

This included composers such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The late 20th Century saw the rise of rock and jukebox musicals, which use more modern types of music like pop, rock and hip-hop.

Modern composers of musicals include Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Schwartz and Elton John.

Watch this thrilling performance of Mambo taken from West Side Story, a musical composed by Leonard Bernstein.

Explore more about Bernstein and Gershwin with BBC Ten Pieces.