Welcome to Operawarhorses.com, a website that will be dedicated to an appreciation and analysis of what is often called the “Standard Repertory” of opera houses throughout the world. As this website defines it, it constitutes a body of operatic works, all of which were first produced in a 140-year period that begins with Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro in 1786 and ends with the posthumous production of Puccini’s Turandot in 1926.
I created this website for the 50th anniversary of the first live operatic performance that I attended - a San Francisco Opera production of Charles Gounod’s Faust - presented in San Diego on November 3, 1955, and starring Licia Albanese, Jan Peerce, Cesare Siepi, Cornell McNeil and Margaret Roggero.
This performance solidified an appreciation of opera that had begun a year before, when I, initially skeptical of idea of opera, was persuaded by a friend to go to the local library and check out the piano score of Wagner’s Tannhauser and then follow the Metropolitan’s 1954 broadcast of that work. That hooked me. Since the 1955 performance of Faust, I have averaged about a dozen or so opera performances a year, which has allowed me to see most of the major opera stars of the last half of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st.
“Warhorses”, when applied to opera, is, of course, considered a pejorative term. When it is applied to horses, it might be meant favorably. (See warhorses.com where recreations of medieval jousting matches are staged in Florida.) Standard Repertory is a more value-neutral way of characterizing such operas as “La Traviata”, “La Boheme”, “Carmen” and “Don Giovanni”, whose popularity is perhaps greater now than when each of these was relatively new.
One of the striking things about the warhorses is that they were mostly all composed by a handful of composers - Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss among the composers who excel in a wide range of musical forms. There were others who preferred to spend most of their time with operas. Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini - specialists in opera - have a significant part of the Standard Repertory between them. Other opera composers have one or more of the warhorses to their credit - Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Ponchielli, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Saint-Saens, Mascagni, Leoncavallo.
Since this is the 50th anniversary of my first “Faust”, I think it is appropriate to begin the discussion of the operatic warhorses with this mainstay of the French repertoire - arguably, after Bizet’s Carmen, the most popular French opera of all time. Its composer, Charles Gounod, has his own shrine on the Internet at www.charles-gounod.com, a beautifully organized website carefully maintained by a descendent.