新托福考试必备：新托福TPO（1-24）听力原文文本TPO12

　　Professor
　　The word opera means work, actually it means works. It’s the plural of the word
　　opus from the Latin. And in Italian it refers in general to works of art. Opera
　　Lyric or lyric of opera refers to what we think of as opera, the musical drama.
　　Opera was commonplace in Italy for almost thousands of years before it
　　became commercial as a venture. And during those years, several things
　　happened primarily linguistic or thematic and both involving secularization.

　　Musical drama started in the churches. It was an educational tool. It was used
　　primarily as a vehicle for teaching religion and was generally presented in the
　　Latin, the language of the Christian Church which had considerable influence
　　in Italy at that time. But the language of everyday life was evolving in Europe
　　and at a certain point in the middle ages it was really only merchants, Socratics
　　and clergy who can deal with Latin. The vast majority of the population used

　　their own regional vernacular in all aspects to their lives. And so in what is now
　　Italy, operas quit being presented in Latin and started being presented in
　　Italian. And once that happened, the themes of the opera presentations also
　　started to change. And musical drama moved from the church to the plaza right
　　outside the church. And the themes again, the themes changed. And opera
　　was no longer about teaching religion as it was about satire and about
　　expressing the ideas of society your government without committing yourself
　　to writing and risking imprisonment or persecution, or what have you.

　　Opera, as we think of it, is of course a rather restive form. It is the melodious
　　drama of ancient Greek theater, the term ‘melodious drama’ being shortened
　　eventually to ‘melodrama’ because operas frequently are melodramatic, not to
　　say unrealistic. And the group that put the first operas together that we have
　　today even, were, they were…well…it was a group of men that included Gallo
　　Leo’s father Venchesil, and they met in Florence he and a group of friends of
　　the counts of the party and they formed what is called the Camarola Dayir
　　Bardy. And they took classical theater and reproduced it in the Renaissance’s
　　time. This…uh…this produced some of the operas that we have today.

　　Now what happened in the following centuries is very simple. Opera originated
　　in Italy but was not confined to Italy any more than the Italians were. And so as
　　the Italians migrated across Europe, they carried theater with them and opera
　　specifically because it was an Italian form. What happened is that the major
　　divide in opera that endures today took place. The French said opera
　　auto-reflect the rhythm and Kevin of dramatic literature, bearing in mind that
　　we are talking about the golden age in French literature. And so the music was
　　secondary, if you will, to the dramatic Kevin of language, to the way the rhythm
　　of language was used to express feeling and used to add drama and of course
　　as a result instead of arias or solos, which would come to dominated Italian
　　opera. The French relied on that what is the Italian called French Word 1 or
　　French Word 2 in English. The lyrics were spoken, frequently to the
　　accomp**nt of a harpsichord.

　　The French said you really cannot talk about real people who lived in opera
　　and they relied on mythology to give them their characters and their plots,
　　mythology, the past old traditions, the novels of chivalry or the epics of chivalry
　　out of the middle Ages. The Italian said, no this is a great historical tool and
　　what a better way to educate the public about Neo or Attalla or any number of
　　people than to put them into a play they can see and listen to. The English
　　appropriated opera after the French. Opera came late to England because all

　　theaters, public theaters were closed, of course, during their civil war. And it
　　wasn’t until the restoration in 1660 that public theaters again opened and
　　opera took off. The English made a major adjustment to opera and exported
　　what they had done to opera back to Italy. So that you have this circle of
　　musical influences, the Italians invented opera, the French adapted it, the
　　English adopted it, and the Italians took it back.

　　It came to America late and was considered to elites for the general public. But
　　Broadway musicals fulfilled a similar function for a great long while. George
　　Champon wrote about opera, “If an extraterrestrial being or two appear before
　　us and say, what is your society like, what is this Earth thing all about, you
　　could do worse than take that creature to an opera.” Because opera does, after
　　all, begin with a man and a woman and any motion