Top 100 Opera Excerpts - the White Hat Guide

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During 2005, the ABC conducted a survey of its listeners to find their top 100 opera excerpts and revealed the results in 2006. Here at White Hat we were surprised and a little alarmed at the resulting list (see our comments below) and decided to compile our own list.

Firstly a comment on the limitations we set ourselves.

Excerpts could be at most as long as a 'scene' but not as long as an 'act'.
We decided to exclude musicals in the American stage musical tradition. They are worth a list in their own right even though few would deny that works like Bernstein's West Side Story are strongly operatic.
We excluded incidental music written for plays but included 'operatic masques'.

Please bear with us for a couple of weeks while we get our list together. It takes a while to track down the correct spelling over a range of languages.

Here is our incomplete list (in rough order from lowest to highest ranking)

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Catalani La Wally - Ebben? Ne andrò lontana [ABC No.30]
Monteverdi The Coronation of Poppea - Pur ti miro [ABC No.51]
Verdi Il Trovatore - Vedi! le fosche notturne spogli (Anvil Chorus) {ABC - unlisted]
Gluck Orfeo ed Euridice - Che faro senza Euridice [ABC No.9]
Verdi Nabucco - "Va, pensiero" (Chorus of the Hebrew slaves)" [ABC No.2]
Bizet Carmen - "Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre" (Toreador's Song) [ABC No.75]
Puccini Turandot - Nessun dorma [ABC No.12]
Gounod Faust - Alerte! Alerte!...Anges purs (Finale Trio and Chorus) [ABC No.21]
Mozart Così fan tutte - Soave sia il vento (Act I trio) [ABC No.4]
Wagner Götterdämmerung - Brünnhilde's Immolation [ABC No.72]
Lehár The Merry Widow - "Es lebt' eine Vilja, ein Waldmägdelein" (Vilia) [ABC No.69]
Wagner Tannhäuser - Der Gnade heil (Pilgrims' Chorus) [ABC No.42]
Bellini I puritani - "A te, o cara" [ABC No.82]
Mozart The Magic Flute - Der Hölle Rache (Queen of the Night aria) [ABC No.18]
Wagner Tristan and Isolde - Liebestod [ABC No.7]
Verdi Otello - Già nella notte densa (Love duet) [ABC No.77]
Bizet The Pearl Fishers - Je crois entendre encore (Act I romance) [ABC No.46]
Mozart The Marriage of Figaro - "Pace, pace...Gente, gente, all'armi" (Act IV finale) [ABC No.29]
Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin - "Puskai pogibnu ya, no pryezhde" (Letter Scene) [ABC No.55]
Wagner Die Walküre - Leb wohl (Wotan's Farewell & Magic Fire Music) [ABC No.40]
Bizet Carmen - L'amour est un oiseau rebelle (Habanera) {ABC No.25]
Saint-Saëns Samson and Delilah - Mon cœur s'ouvre a ta voix (Softly awakes my heart) [ABC No.27]
Beethoven Fidelio - Mir ist so wunderbar (Act I quartet) [ABC No.24]
Falla La Vida Breve - Choral Intermezzo and first dance {ABC - unlisted]
Mozart The Marriage of Figaro - Overture [ABC No.84]
Vaughan Williams Pilgrim's Progress - Final scene [ABC - unlsited]
Puccini La bohème - O soave fanciulla [ABC No.14]
Weber Die Freischütz - Huntsmen's Chorus [ABC - unlsited]
Verdi La traviata - "Parigi, o cara" (Final duet) [ABC No.91]
Mozart The Magic Flute - O Isis und Osiris [ABC No.61]
Leoncavallo Pagliacci - Vesti la giubba (On with the motley) {ABC No.41]
Dvorák Rusalka - Song to the Moon [ABC No.11]
Puccini Tosca - E lucevan le stelle [ABC No.22]
Wagner Die Walküre - Ho-jo-to-ho (The Ride of the Valkyries) [ABC No.64]
Stravinsky Oedipus Rex - Divum Jocasta [ABC - not listed]
Gershwin Porgy and Bess - Summertime {ABC No.62]
Mozart The Marriage of Figaro - "Esci, omai, garzon malnato" (Act II finale) [ABC No,93]
Rossini The Barber of Seville - "Largo al factotum" [ABC No.90]
Verdi Otello - "Piangea cantando" (Willow Song & Ave Maria) [ABC No.94]
Puccini Madame Butterfly - Un bel dì (One fine day) [ABC No.6]
Purcell Dido and Aeneas - "When I am laid in earth" (Dido's Lament & flanking choruses) [ABC No.5 but did not include choruses]
Bartók Bluebeard's Castle - Fifth Door [ABC - unlisted]
Weber Die Freischütz - Wolfs Glen Scene [ABC - unlisted]
Britten Peter Grimes - "Now the Great Bear" & "Old Joe has gone fishing" {ABC - unlisted]
Mozart Don Giovanni - "Don Giovanni, a cenar teco" (Act II: The statue comes to dinner) [ABC No.26]
Bizet The Pearl Fishers - "Au fond du temple saint" (In the depths of the temple) [ABC No.1]
Wagner Götterdämmerung - Siegfried's Funeral Music (Act III) [ABC No.67]
Verdi Rigoletto - Bella figlia dell'amore (Act III quartet) [ABC No.8]
R. Strauss Der Rosenkavalier - "Hab' mir's gelobt" (Act III trio and finale) [ABC No.10]

Some other selections (we are currently chasing up the correct titles)

G&S - what to choose?
Britten - what to choose?
Zarzuela - what to choose?
Janacek - what to choose?
Peggy Glanville -Hicks?
Rameau - what to choose?
Purcell masque
Beggars' Opera
Kurt Weill
Mussorgsky, Glinka & Borodin - what to choose?
Monteverdi - Orfeo's song
More R.Strauss
Phillip's Aria from Don Carlo
O Ruddier than the cherry
John Adams - Death of Klinghoffer

Our comments on the ABC Top 100 list

For the list as chosen by ABC listeners see Top 100 Opera Moments.

We noted that:

There are only four items earlier than Mozart and none later than Porgy and Bess (1935).
There is no Britten and no Janáček.
There are a number of pieces by Bellini and Donizetti but only one by Rossini (and that at No.90)
There are numbers of light pieces but no pieces from 'light' opera such as Ballad Operas, Zarzuelas or Gilbert & Sullivan
There is the mad scene from Lucia but not the clock scene from Boris Godunov or the 'mad scene' from Peter Grimes.
Apart from two arias from Eugene Onegin there is no Russian opera.
There is the Humming Chorus from Butterfly but not the Anvil Chorus from Trovatore or the Huntsmen's Chorus from Freischütz - in fact not even the Wolf's Glen Scene from Freischütz.
There are no Australian works

As we stated at the top of this page, we found this list surprising and a little distressing. There are no 'right' or 'wrong' answers for such lists, so why should we be distressed? The conservative and relatively narrow choices must ring alarm bells for opera administrators and classical music radio stations about the sustainability of audiences. Australia has the most famous 'modern' opera house in the world but the list would indicate that no-one under the age of 70 wants to listen to opera written in their own lifetime or in their own country.

What could cause this situation? Our major opera companies have been relatively conservative in programming, but not nearly as conservative as the list would seem to indicate. In addition, there have been some excellent productions by the smaller opera companies of important but lesser-performed operas. Also, although ABC television is rather sparse with its offerings of broadcast opera, SBS television has broadcast numbers of excellent productions of operas from outside the core of conservative operas represented on the ABC top 100 list.

The following are a few suggestions as to why the ABC list ended up as it did:

Not surprisingly, the list seems strongly influenced by the products most heavily advertised by ABC radio over the years.
The list leans towards 'cup of tea with the vicar' style rather than griitier music. This may be because (like White Hat) those who like more challenging music in their mix are likely to be annoyed by the somewhat prissy and chatty style of announcer as 'personality' promoted by ABC FM and simply go elsewhere.