Chamber opera is a designation for operas written to be performed with a chamber ensemble rather than a full orchestra.
The term and form were invented by Benjamin Britten in the 1940s, when the English Opera Group needed works that could easily be taken on tour and performed in a variety of small performance spaces. The Rape of Lucretia was the first example of the genre, and Britten followed it with Albert Herring, The Turn of the Screw and Curlew River. Other composers, including Hans Werner Henze, Harrison Birtwistle, Thomas Adès, George Benjamin, Matthew Davidson, and Philip Glass, have since adopted the term for their own works.
Instrumentation for a chamber opera will vary: Britten scored The Rape of Lucretia for eight singers with single strings and wind with piano, harp and percussion. Matthew King's The Snow Queen has three singers in multiple roles, with an ensemble of seven players while Judith Weir's King Harald's Saga is for a single soprano voice.
The term chamber opera is also sometimes used to describe smaller Baroque operatic works such as Pergolesi's La serva padrona and Charpentier's Les Arts florissants, which also use small instrumental and vocal ensembles.
Famous quotes containing the words chamber and/or opera:
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls,—the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot- box once a year, but on what kind of a man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)