Opera is weird!

Everybody's wearing makeup.They're singing in a strange language. Women play men. Men sing like women. 45-year-olds play teenagers. All the main characters seem to get killed off. And when somebody dies, they take ten minutes to sing about it.

By golly, it's the greatest entertainment on earth!

Still, all that weirdness winds up intimidating plenty of people. We all tend to avoid whatever makes us insecure. Deep down, a little voice tells us that if we show up at an opera without any clue about what's going on, the snobs will notice and laugh us out of the opera house.

But here's a little secret about opera: Nobody knows what's going on all the time without a little help - not even the snobs.

An opera is a theater piece, like a play. But instead of speaking their lines, the characters sing them. Even Broadway musicals in which the music never stops, such as Les Miserables, Evita, and Tommy, are very similar to opera.

Operas were invented to combine the best of all possible worlds - awesome singing, great-sounding orchestra, riveting drama, stunning dance, spectacular sets, lavish costumes, fancy lighting, and special effects. By uniting those arts, the founding fathers of opera managed to create an art form more powerful than any other.

Over the centuries, opera has become more fun than it ever was, because:

* The world has accumulated so many more operas!

* We now know all about the shocking, amazing lives of the great composers!

* The baffling mystique of the opera star has become entertainment in itself!

Apart from insecurity, some people avoid opera because they think it's an old musty, highbrow art form reserved for people who wear tuxedos and ride in limousines. Most people would rather go to a movie.

The funny thing is, until recently, going to an opera was like going to a movie. People went to an opera to have fun. They went to see their favorite stars and hear their favorite tunes. They wore casual clothes. There was plenty of gossiping and eating. Back in those days, classical music was pop music.

In fact, when Verdi wrote his opera Otello (Othello), the crowd went crazy, calling him back to the stage over and over again with standing ovations, finally carrying him all the way home on their shoulders, and then serenading him under his window. Even rock stars don't get that kind of treatment today.

Opera is just as entertaining as it ever was. But these days, it has become much less familiar. That's all. After you become familiar with the art form, you'll be amazed at how entertaining it becomes.

You'd be astounded at how much opera you already know. The commercial with the soprano singing at the top of her lungs, inside the luxury car, is opera. The other car commercial, in which the hero loses his keys on the way to the opera, is opera. Even the Bugs Bunny classic, The Rabbit of Seville, with Elmer Fudd singing "Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit" to the tune of the Ride of the Valkyries, is opera. In all those TV tidbits, the tunes are pure opera music.

So the world's most beloved opera melodies are already hopping around inside your brain. Now, to be comfortable with this universe of weirdness, you need to explore a few more things: Some history, some conventions, and a few of the best operas out there.

In the immortal words of Mr. Spock: "Captain, there is no cause for alarm." And in the immortal words of Dr. Spock: "You know more than you think you do."

Not every opera will turn you on right away. And that's perfectly okay.

Some operas are more "accessible" than others. That is, some have beautiful melodies that you can hum instantly, whereas others, on first listening, sound more like a cat caught in a trap.

Furthermore, just as you have favorite popular composers, you're bound to have favorite opera composers. Perhaps one style will seem to speak to you more at first than all the others.

Despite the incredible variety of styles within the world of music, certain consistent qualities make an opera great.

In the best operas, the composers themselves were deeply moved by their material. They chose subject matter that they felt strongly about.

Beethoven's Fidelio is about an individual struggling to break free of the bonds of tyranny and oppression - just as he struggled against the burden of his own deafness. Die Fledermaus is Johann Strauss's most popular operetta, and that's no surprise; the opera is full of sparkling waltzes and polkas, the very qualities that made Strauss a superstar. Puccini had spent years as a starving young composer, and he poured his life experience into La Boheme, his greatest hit.

Verdi, one of opera's greatest composers, considered himself an ordinary guy. Sure enough, he had an affinity for stories about common people in uncommon situations. Other composers had read and rejected the libretto for Nabucco, for example; but Verdi was captivated by the story of Hebrew slaves yearning for freedom, and that opera became his first huge success.

In every case, the composer was able to set a story to music because he understood it well. The result is completely convincing.

All good operas, and all great movies and Broadway musicals, too, for that matter, express deep-seated human emotions (except Cats, which expresses deep-seated feline emotions).

Not your everyday, run-of-the-mill emotions, like the frustration of AOL busy signals or the grossness of finding a bug on your pizza. Instead, the enormous gut-wrenching emotions, such as love, anger, pride, lust, greed, and envy. In the best operas, those emotions become the engine that drives the plot.

The reason is simple: Those emotions are universal. No matter what the story, no matter what strange times and places are depicted, the emotions remain constant.

And that's why people sing in operas. Putting emotion to music somehow immortalizes it, making it larger than life and casting it in stone.

And speaking of casting in stone: When the doomed lovers sing "Oh terra, addio" at the end of Aida, you cry, not because two ancient characters are getting walled up in an Egyptian tomb, but because two good people have to suffer so greatly for their love.

Good operas have good stories. You may as well find out right now: Most opera plots involve a lot of vice. The vice portrayed in operas make TV's offerings look positively sugar-coated.

From the beginning, opera producers realized what people wanted, which is just want they want today: Sex, violence, and murder without too many commercials.

Of course, the problems encountered in opera are far more dramatic than those in your everyday life; after all, how many people do you know that have been impregnated by a god???

One of many examples of vice in opera can be found in Mozart's Don Giovanni - the story of an insatiable sex maniac.

Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, got away with a story like that, even in their highly moralistic time, because of two mitigating circumstances. First, Don Giovanni goes to Hell at the end. Second, everyone comes onstage afterward to say, "Look what happens when you act like that!"

That moralizing wasn't the purpose of the opera - only the excuse for it. In Mozart's time, the moralizing was a requirement so that the audience could feel really good about the vices it had just witnessed. Sound familiar? Sure it does - it's the formula for every American adventure movie ever made. The villain gets killed in the end; that's a given. But the fun part is, you get to see him do a lot of really wicked stuff first.

But too much sex and violence can be boring. Effective opera composers (and their librettists) know how to use variety to keep you listening. If the librettist includes some funny scenes for comic relief, the shocking conclusion will be all the more shocking. Similarly, if the composer uses a variety of musical ideas, or dynamics, or melodies, or harmonies, he's much more likely to keep your interest.

In an opera, as in a movie, a climactic moment of violence can be thrilling if it's approached with a suspenseful buildup. Effective composers know how to use dramatic pacing. Their music builds up suspense as it approaches the climax. Great composers take care that no scene is aimless, that no aria is too long, and that the action, like this sentence, always progresses toward its inevitable pulse-racing, nail-biting, toe-tapping, brow-sweating, heart-pounding, earth-shattering conclusion!

Since the early days, nearly all operas have transported the audience to a different place and time. Even during the Renaissance, which you'd think would have been early enough, the operas were about even earlier times - ancient Greece and Rome.

Gluck's Orfeo takes place both on earth and in the Underworld. The action of Berlioz's Les Troyens transpires in ancient Troy. And Wagner's massive Ring cycle takes place underwater, in the depths of a primeval forest, and up in the heavens, among other places.

The key word is exotic. The more exotic the locale, the greater the possibilities for interesting sets, costumes, and special effects. Verdi's Aida is one of the most popular operas of all time. Sure, sure, it has great music and a wonderful plot; those are prerequisites. But besides all that, Aida is set in Egypt and has elephants. You can't say that about My Fair Lady.

You hear again and again that some of the greatest composers were misunderstood in their own day - their music was considered too "modern." Not everyone could relate to the operas of Handel, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, or even Puccini when they were first performed. An yet today, those operas are considered easy listening.

The reason for that original lack of acceptance is unfamiliarity. Each composer's unique musical language was completely new. And yet, that is one of the things that makes those operas so great. Effective opera composers have their own ideas.

In the movie Amadeus, the composer Salieri is the "host" of the movie; he's depicted as one of the most famous non-great composers. He lived at the time of Mozart; wrote operas at the same time Mozart did, and was completely overshadowed by him. Now, Salieri was not a bad composer; in fact he was a very good one. But he wasn't one of the world's great composers because his work wasn't original. What he wrote sounded just like what everyone else was composing at the time.

In the modern pop-music world, the word HOOK refers to the catchy, repeated element in a piece of music. Beatles songs are catchy because nearly every one of them has a HOOK. Think of "Help!" or "A Hard Day's Night" or "She Loves You." ("Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!"). Catchiness is not a scientifically measurable quality; still, you know a HOOK when you hear it.

In opera, the same concept applies. A HOOK helps you remember, and identify with, a particular aria, duet, or chorus. The operas of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, and Johann Strauss have HOOKS galore. The music of the most effective composers is full of elements that stick in your mind.

Of all the composers just mentioned, Verdi and Puccini take the cake; your average non-opera person can hum several of their melodies without even trying (and without even knowing that those famous tunes come from operas). Is it any wonder, then, that those guys are the two most popular opera composers of all time?

But what's a good tune if nobody can sing it? For at least 300 years, opera composers have known that a superstar singer in the title role can mean success for an opera. And what better way to highlight that superstar than to give them a great vehicle in which to shine?

Most opera composers, from Handel to the present day, have written with particular singers in mind. If a particular opera has lots of high Cs, for example, you can bet that the composer knew who would be singing them. And if another opera seems to avoid them altogether - well, the composer probably had good reason there, too.

Now that you know a little more about the subject of opera, it's time to actually experience one for yourself. For starters, you may wish to listen to an audio recording or watch a DVD. Better still, see a live performance. There's up to 25,000 from which you can choose, so enjoy the wonderful world of opera!