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Best Of Opera

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The greatest voices humanity has ever heard.
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "I Dreamed a Dream" - Susan Boyle The audience was laughing before the first note. Susan Boyle, 47, unemployed, had just walked onto the stage of the Clyde Auditorium, in Glasgow, and said she wanted to be a singer — as good as Elaine Paige. The room didn't hide what it thought of that. She chose to sing "I Dreamed a Dream", from Les Misérables — Fantine's lament, a single mother just fired from the factory and thrown into the street, looking back at the days when she still had something to dream about. The same audience that had laughed at her was about to hear a discarded woman sing about being discarded. The first note fell into the exact silence after the laughter. From there the room turned: the ovation began before the last note even ended, and when the cut closed, the entire audience was on its feet. Judge Piers Morgan said it right there, live: "everyone was laughing at you, no one is laughing now." Judge Amanda Holden described the audience's initially cynical attitude and called what came after "the biggest wake-up call ever." According to the Sunday Times, that audition was the first time she had sung in public since her mother's death. In nine days, 103 million people had already seen it, across 20 different sites. By the end of that year, it was voted the most watched video on YouTube — more than 120 million views, more than three times the runner-up. Have you ever judged someone before hearing what they had to say — or sing? Work: "I Dreamed a Dream" (Les Misérables) Composer: Claude-Michel Schönberg Performer: Susan Boyle 🇬🇧 Recording: Britain's Got Talent, aired on 11 April 2009 Follow for more voices that refuse to be forgotten. #BestOfOpera #SusanBoyle #LesMiserables #IDreamedADream by @bestofopera
38
20 hours ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "Quando rapito in estasi" - Anna Netrebko Parmi che a lui d'accanto si schiuda il ciel per me it seems that, by his side, heaven opens for me Before singing on any major stage, Anna Netrebko cleaned the Mariinsky Theatre, in Saint Petersburg. She was still a student at the city's Conservatory, and knew the theater's corridors from the inside — but not as an artist. That's where she decided to audition. And it was there, listening to her, that conductor Valery Gergiev recognized her — from the work she did in that same building. Gergiev became her vocal mentor from that day on. By August 2002, she was already singing Donna Anna in Don Giovanni under Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Salzburg Festival — the breakthrough that launched her onto the international circuit. When this concert was recorded, on June 1, 2003, she was already singing Lucia professionally — but hadn't yet debuted the role on stage, in a full staged production. That would only happen five months later, in November, at Los Angeles Opera. The aria you're hearing speaks of a heaven opening. For her career, one was about to open too. On January 14, 2009, she returned to sing Lucia at the very Mariinsky she used to clean. In the following weeks, she brought the role to the Metropolitan Opera too. How many years separate someone cleaning a theater from, years later, returning to it in the lead role? 🎼 Work: Quando rapito in estasi (Lucia di Lammermoor) ✍️ Composer: Gaetano Donizetti 🎤 Performer: Anna Netrebko 🇷🇺 📅 Recording: June 1, 2003 Did you know this story? Comment. #BestOfOpera #AnnaNetrebko #LuciaDiLammermoor #Donizetti by @bestofopera
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a day ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix" - Elena Obraztsova Ah! réponds à ma tendresse! Verse-moi, verse-moi l'ivresse! Ah! respond to my tenderness! Fill me with ecstasy! Samson stands before her, about to say goodbye. And Dalila opens her mouth to sing the most beautiful love declaration in all of opera. Before that, alone, she had already sung that her power of seduction was greater than his strength. The Philistine High Priest had offered her gold to hand him over. She refused: she didn't want money, she wanted revenge. The opera's own synopsis describes this aria with one hard word: a trap. Dalila tells Samson, seductively, that she is completely his — only to pry out of him the secret he's hiding. It works. He confesses: the strength is in his hair. She calls the hidden Philistine soldiers, and they capture him. In the next act, facing him already defeated, Dalila sings the same love melody again — now to mock him, telling him in detail how she tricked him. The most beautiful song in opera becomes the trophy of its own crime. Would you have spotted the trap before Samson did? 🎼 Work: Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix (Samson et Dalila, Act II) ✍️ Composer: Camille Saint-Saëns 🇫🇷 🎤 Performer: Elena Obraztsova 🇷🇺 🎥 Recording: concert in Tokyo, 05/20/1980, with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tadashi Mori Did you know this story? Comment below. #BestOfOpera #SamsonAndDalila #SaintSaens #ClassicalOpera by @bestofopera
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a day ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "Nessun dorma" - Franco Corelli "Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, il nome mio nessun saprà! No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò quando la luce splenderà!" "But my mystery is locked inside me, no one will know my name! No, no, on your lips I will say it when the light breaks!" Pavarotti said Franco Corelli had vocal cords of steel. The line makes you picture a whole childhood in a singing studio, a maestro shaping that high note one note at a time. There was no maestro. Corelli was studying naval engineering at the University of Bologna when a friend's bet pushed him into a singing competition. He lost. The defeat took him to the Pesaro Conservatory — and there the story turned inside out. He left saying the lessons had destroyed his top notes. He resigned as a student. Voice teachers, he said, were "dangerous people", "a plague on singers". He learned the only way he trusted: records. Caruso, Lauri-Volpi, Pertile, Gigli. He played them and imitated until his body understood. He added a friend who had studied with Mario Del Monaco's teacher. That was the whole school. The top note he had written off as destroyed is the one you hear now. And this is no theatre: it is a film RAI commissioned for the centenary of Puccini's birth, shot in the Milan studios and broadcast on 23 December 1958. Nobody handed him that voice. He built it by ear, copying whoever was already on record. If you had to teach yourself to sing, which voice would you play first? 🎭 Work: Nessun dorma — Giacomo Puccini 🇮🇹 🎤 Performer: Franco Corelli 🇮🇹 🎬 Recording: RAI film, Milan studios, 23/12/1958 — TV director: Mario Lanfranchi · conductor: Fernando Previtali · RAI Milan Orchestra and Chorus 🇮🇹 Did you know this story? Comment below. #BestOfOpera #FrancoCorelli #NessunDorma #Opera by @bestofopera
188
2 days ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "Miserere mei, Deus" - Aksel Rykkvin "Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea, et a peccato meo munda me." "Wash me clean of my wrongdoing, and rid me of my sin." The most famous note in this music is a copying error. It was never in Allegri's score. In 1831, Mendelssohn heard the Miserere and wrote down the ornament the singers were making: a high G. The piece was apparently being performed a fourth above the written key. In 1880, W. S. Rockstro published the Miserere in the first edition of the Grove Dictionary and got the second choir wrong: he grafted Mendelssohn's ornament onto the second half of the verse. A high G plus a fourth makes a high C. The note was born of that sum. Nobody went back to the source. Robert Haas copied the error straight from Grove in 1932, "producing the 'top C' version". Ivor Atkins copied it from Haas in 1951. The King's College recording based on that edition sealed the high C, and it is the version the world performs today. Specialist literature calls the episode, literally, "a most bizarre musicological error". The one taking that high C now is 12 years old. Aksel Rykkvin, treble, would turn 13 seventeen days later. This is not a concert: it is the close of a Good Friday service, live on NRK, at Nordstrand Church in Oslo, on 25 March 2016. The verse in the clip is verse 3 of Psalm 51, a plea for forgiveness, sung by the four-voice choir, exactly where the note lives. If the note got in by mistake, should it still be sung? Work · Miserere mei, Deus Composer · 🇮🇹 Allegri Performer · 🇳🇴 Aksel Rykkvin, treble, 12 years old Recording · NRK, live from Nordstrand Church, Oslo — 25/03/2016 Did you know this story? Tell us in the comments. #BestOfOpera #Miserere #Allegri #AkselRykkvin by @bestofopera
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2 days ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "Agni Parthene" - Christiane Najjar يا بهجة كل الرهبان والأنفس الطهرية "O joy of all the monks and of the pure souls" María Aipárthene kósmu pantós Kiría, "Mary, ever Virgin, Lady of all the world" A woman alone in the frame, from the first second to the last. She sings in Arabic a prayer to the Virgin Mary: she asks not to be abandoned in life, not to drown in sin, to be reached by salvation. No one comes in, no one leaves, nothing is resolved. The chant was not born in Arabic. It was written in Greek, by a man who was made a bishop in 1889 and declared a saint in 1961 by the patriarch of Constantinople. Of everything he wrote, it is this chant that is listed as his principal work. The church credited in this recording is not his. It is Catholic, it answers to the Pope, and it separated from Orthodoxy in 1724 — taking with it the same liturgy and the same chants. The saint stayed on one side. The melody crossed to the other. Around 1:50 the words change language in the middle of the melodic line. The Arabic turns into Greek, with no pause and no warning, and the piece ends in Greek. Najjar's voice does not change course: it is the same melody from beginning to end. What moves is the language, underneath it. Two churches separated for three centuries, two languages inside the same track, one single melody. Can you hear the exact second the language changes? 🎼 Work: Agni Parthene ("Pure Virgin", in Greek) ✍️ Composer: Nectarios of Aegina — bishop in 1889, saint in 1961 🎙️ Performer: Christiane Najjar 💿 Recording: Greek Catholic Melkite church, separated from Orthodoxy in 1724 Did you know this story? Comment below. #BestOfOpera #AgniParthene #ChristianeNajjar #SacredMusic by @bestofopera
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2 days ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 Game of Thrones: Suite & The Rains of Castamere - Danish National Symphony Orchestra The stage is full: Denmark's national symphony orchestra, the national choir, the national youth choir and two soloists, all under a single conductor. The country's public television broadcast the concert in 2019. But what starts here is not the main theme yet. It is a song, with a voice and lyrics. Two pieces are spliced into the same recording, each with its own arranger, and the theme arrives at 04:23 — when the voices drop away and the orchestra attacks alone. It is worth the wait. The song that comes first has a job inside the series: it is what the musicians at the feast play seconds before a massacre begins. The whole episode is named after it. Anyone who recognises it already knows what is coming. And it is older than the series. The lyrics were written by the author of the books inside a novel from 2000. Only eleven years later did it get music, at the request of the show's creators. Ramin Djawadi wrote both — and everything else that plays in Game of Thrones. That is why the splice on stage never sounds like a collage: it is one hand, first the warning, then the opening. Did you recognise the song before 04:23, or were you waiting for the theme? 🎼 Work: Game of Thrones: Suite & The Rains of Castamere 🎹 Composer: Ramin Djawadi 🎤 Performers: Denmark's national symphony orchestra, national choir and national youth choir 🇩🇰 📀 Recording: concert broadcast by Danish public television, 2019 Did you know this story? Tell us in the comments. #BestOfOpera #GameOfThrones #RaminDjawadi #DanishNationalSymphonyOrchestra by @bestofopera
2
3 days ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "Ah! mes amis... Pour mon âme" - Lawrence Brownlee "Pour mon âme, quel destin ! J'ai sa flamme, j'ai sa main ! Jour prospère ! Me voici, Militaire et mari !" "For my soul, what a destiny! I have her flame, I have her hand! What a fine day! Here I am, soldier and husband!" A man enlists in a regiment for one reason only: to stay close to Marie, the woman he loves. And it worked. There is no death in this scene, no threat. What you hear is pure joy. Why does the literature call this aria the "Mount Everest" of tenors? Because his joy is written in chest-voice high Cs. The cabaletta stacks those notes, the highest a tenor can reach, with no room to breathe and none to miss. Here is what almost nobody knows: everyone repeats that there are nine high Cs. Donizetti wrote eight. The ninth is not in the score: it came from stage tradition, and it stayed. Nine are sung because the audience expects nine, not because the composer asked. Lawrence Brownlee sang Tonio in this Metropolitan Opera production on 12 December 2011. In March 2012, critic Joanne Sydney Lessner wrote in Opera News that he hit the nine high Cs fully and firmly: they were the most beautiful notes of the evening. Pavarotti sang this aria, in the same house, in 1972. He walked out with a nickname for life: King of the High Cs. Not for beauty. For difficulty. Eight written, nine sung. If you were the tenor, would you drop the ninth? 🎭 Work: "Ah! mes amis... Pour mon âme", from La Fille du régiment 🎼 Composer: Gaetano Donizetti 🇮🇹 🎤 Singer: Lawrence Brownlee 🇺🇸 📀 Recording: stage rehearsal, Laurent Pelly production, Met Opera 🇺🇸, 2025-26, conductor Giacomo Sagripanti Did you know this story? Tell us below. #BestOfOpera #LawrenceBrownlee #Donizetti #LaFilleDuRegiment by @bestofopera
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3 days ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 Casta Diva - Aida Garifullina "Casta Diva, che inargenti queste sacre antiche piante, a noi volgi il bel sembiante senza nube e senza vel..." "Chaste Goddess, who silvers these sacred ancient trees, turn upon us your fair face unclouded and unveiled..." December 26, 1831, Teatro alla Scala. On the night this melody premiered, the man who wrote it sent a friend a letter: "Fiasco! Fiasco! Solemn fiasco!" Vincenzo Bellini was talking about his own premiere. The scene is a prayer. Norma, a druid high priestess, prays to the moon in a sacred grove, on the eve of announcing an uprising against the Roman occupation to her people. In public she keeps up the front of her office; in secret she loves Pollione, a Roman proconsul — the enemy. What she asks the moon for is peace. The second performance was received differently. At La Scala alone, the opera reached 208 stagings by the end of the century. Giuditta Pasta, the soprano Bellini wrote Norma for, felt the aria did not suit her voice. It took a week of rehearsals before she embraced it. She later acknowledged that the resistance had no grounds. The voice here is Aida Garifullina, in an arena in Kazan, on May 22, 2014. She was born in that city, on September 30, 1987. The orchestra draws back beneath the vocal line, and what is left in the air is the melody that premiered inside a fiasco declared by the man who wrote it. At La Scala, on that night in 1831, would you have bet on this melody? 🎼 Casta Diva, from the opera Norma ✍️ Vincenzo Bellini 🇮🇹 🎤 Aida Garifullina 🇷🇺 🎧 TatNeft Arena, Kazan 🇷🇺, May 22, 2014 — State Symphony Orchestra of the Republic of Tatarstan, conducted by Eugene Kohn Did you know this story? Tell us in the comments. #BestOfOpera #CastaDiva #AidaGarifullina #Bellini by @bestofopera
34
3 days ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "Una voce poco fa" - Kathleen Battle Una voce poco fa Qui nel cor mi risuonò A voice, a moment ago Echoed here in my heart Antwerp, December 1984. The cameras of a TV show turn to Kathleen Battle, who opens her mouth to sing Rosina's introduction — docile, demure, the perfect ward her guardian dreams of keeping at home. Rosina is an orphan, locked away by Count Almaviva, who wants to marry her. "Una voce poco fa" is how she introduces herself to the audience — and Rossini wrote that voice for the lowest register in the female voice: the contralto. But true contraltos are rare. Over time, the role came to be sung by coloratura mezzo-sopranos and, sometimes, by coloratura sopranos — Kathleen Battle among them. She is a lyric coloratura soprano; a critic called her, in 1985, the best in the world at it. Raising Rosina's voice is not a technicality. According to Alberto Zedda, author of the opera's critical edition, transposing the role for soprano forces the second lady, Berta, down a register — a part Rossini wrote for soprano. A higher voice in the lead remaps the whole opera. And the aria itself gives the warning: Rosina promises to be docile — until she says that if anyone crosses her, she turns into a viper, into a hundred cats. Which Rosina do you prefer: the low one Rossini wrote, or the high one you hear today? 🎼 Work: "Una voce poco fa", from Il barbiere di Siviglia 🎼 Composer: Gioachino Rossini 🇮🇹 🎤 Performer: Kathleen Battle 🇺🇸 (lyric coloratura soprano) 🎥 Recording: Antwerp, December 1984 (TV) Send this to someone who loves a great voice. #BestOfOpera #Rossini #Opera #KathleenBattle by @bestofopera
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4 days ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "Тело Христово приимите" - Bit-Haribi & Bogoliúbov Two men, two microphones, the same verse repeated without stopping: "Receive the Body of Christ, taste the fountain of immortality." No words between the lines, no pause — just continuous chant, one deep voice below and one higher above, both at once. Side by side, they seem to hold the same place in the hierarchy of the Mass. They don't. Beside him, hierodeacon Bogoliúbov sings in Church Slavonic — and that's almost everything known about him for certain. No parish, no training, no country of ordination is on record; the sources don't even agree on his first name. On the other side stands a priest, and not just any priest: schema-archimandrite Seraphim, known as Bit-Haribi, is the second clergyman in the world to celebrate the entire Divine Liturgy in the language Jesus spoke — a language no one has today as a living, everyday tongue. He is ethnically Assyrian, son of a Georgian mother, born and raised in Georgia, where he was ordained deacon in 2010 under the blessing of Patriarch Ilia II. In this performance, the two men sing at the same time: Bogoliúbov in Church Slavonic, Bit-Haribi in Aramaic — the verse belongs to the moment of communion inside the Mass; here, it rises to a stage, and the audience applauds when it ends. The sources can't even agree on the hierodeacon's first name — Andrei or Feofil? Which one sounds right to you? 🎵 Work: Тело Христово приимите (Receive the Body of Christ) ✍️ Composer: Orthodox liturgical tradition 🎤 Performers: Schema-archimandrite Seraphim (Bit-Haribi) 🇬🇪 · Hierodeacon Bogoliúbov 🎬 Recording: date and location not determined by research Follow for more sounds you've never heard before. #BestOfOpera #OrthodoxChant #LanguageOfChrist #LiturgicalMusic by @bestofopera
72
4 days ago
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Follow @bestofopera for the voices that refuse to be forgotten. 🎵 "I Pagliacci" - Sydney Mancasola & Iurii Samoilov "Fuggi, fuggi con me!" "Non mi tentar! Vuoi tu perder la vita mia?" "Taci Silvio, non più... È delirio, è follia!" "Flee, flee with me!" "Don't tempt me! Do you want to lose my life?" "Hush, Silvio, no more... It's madness, it's folly!" The two singers in this recording aren't facing an audience — they're facing the orchestra, rehearsing opera's most dangerous scene: a secret meeting between lovers, about to be discovered. Nedda is married to Canio, owner of the traveling theater troupe where they both work. Silvio is a village lad — and her lover. That night, he asks her to run away with him. She hesitates, calls it madness... and gives in. They don't know they're being overheard. The troupe's fool, rejected by Nedda earlier, runs to fetch her husband. Silvio escapes unrecognized — but Canio already knows: there's a lover. He just doesn't know who. In the second act, in front of the audience, Canio stops performing. He demands the name. And kills Nedda right there, on stage. With her last breath, she screams "Silvio!". He climbs onto the stage to help her — and Canio kills him too. What you're hearing isn't the actual performance. It's the rehearsal, with the orchestra — no costumes, no set, no audience. Before any audience sees this scene, it's just the two singers, the orchestra, and the work of making the moment come alive. Nedda hesitated before saying yes to Silvio. Do you think she should have run away with him? 🎼 Work: I Pagliacci — Nedda and Silvio's duet ✍️ Composer: Ruggero Leoncavallo 🎤 Performers: Sydney Mancasola (Nedda) & Iurii Samoilov (Silvio) 🎻 Recording: orchestra rehearsal Written 134 years ago. It stopped you today. #BestOfOpera #Pagliacci #Leoncavallo #Opera by @bestofopera
21
4 days ago
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