Born in Florence around 1600 from scholars trying to revive Greek sung drama, opera is staged drama in which characters sing rather than speak — voice, orchestra, and spectacle fused into one overwhelming experience. Its structure alternates recitative (sung speech that moves the plot) with the aria, the showpiece of pure emotion. It spread through Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini into distinct national styles. Its glory carried a cost: the castrati, boys castrated to preserve high voices, were central to baroque opera for two centuries. Expensive and long tied to wealth, it remains a great art and a contested one.
Opera begins from a premise that ought to be absurd — that a person in love, in terror, or about to die would not speak but sing — and has spent four centuries, and fortunes, making that absurdity sublime. It is at once the grandest of the arts and the most mocked.