Opera trivia

OK, so who wrote the most operas? Which is the longest opera? What is my favourite opera?

There are many who believe that opera is the supreme musical and theatrical art form - gesamptkunstwerk, as the Germans say. Wagner was certainly of the opinion that opera should be more than just the "monstrosities" of Grand Opera and Bel Canto, with its emphasis on bravura singing and "meaningless plots". Take that, Guiseppe Verdi! Although for meaningless plots try watching Richard's final opera, Parsifal.

Wagner was certainly a competitor for the longest opera, Die Meistersinger von Nűrnberg coming in at over 5 hours. Of course, some might consider his Ring cycle (18 hours) of four operas as really one gigantic work.

But Wagner was a mere novice in comparison with 20th century composers. Karlheinz Stockhausen composed his Licht cycle of 7 operas, subtitled Die sieben Tage der Woche (The Seven Days of the Week), totalling 29 hours. Suffice to say, not many performances have occurred. But the winner is...

Robert Wilson's The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, listed by Guinness World Records as the longest single opera ever performed, at 15 hours and 15 minutes. My guess is that, at this very moment, there is an American composer trapped in a White House basement, tapping away at his keyboard and writing "Trump - the Opera", coming in at 15 hours and 16 minutes, enabling our hero to say "I am the longest. The very longest. So long." (and I think we can all echo those last two words)

Who composed the most operas? Many would cite Donizetti at 75. But the Austrian Wenzel Müller (1767-1835) apparently wrote 166. There's one for the pub quiz.

Verdi's La Traviata, definitely not on Wagner's Spotify playlist, was cited by OperaBase in 2016 as being the most performed opera, with 4,190 to that point. A distant second was the opera most people would guess at for the title was Mozart's Magic Flute, with a mere 3,310. Karlheinz, you have no chance...

My favourite opera? It has to be Wagner. I enjoy the pre-Ring and post-Ring operas (to be fair, they are a bit intermingled so don't pick me up on chronology) more than the Ring itself. I absolutely love the music of Parsifal but the plot is drivel. So it has to be Tristan und Isolde.

Thanks for reading; feel free to share your favourites in the Comments.