Opera in the 19th Century had many women who dominated opera from the mid 19th
century. It was said that no male singer was more popular. People like Adelina
Patti, Jenny Lind, and Natalie Melba were all sopranos. A soprano is the
highest female voice that has the flexibility to handle the most brilliant
music. Opera singers attained a huge fortune and it was common for them to
flaunt their wealth. Opera in the 19th Century had no particular
unity to it. The only thing that had any form of unity was in the stage design.
Rehearsals were rare and the singers would almost never rehearse with the rest
of the cast. The singer was always center stage and looked as if they ignored
everything else.
Mise-en-scene is everything that
appears in the framing. So this would include actors, lighting, décor, props,
costume, etc. It is a French word that means “placing on stage”. Another thing
that is considered part of the mise-en-scene is the camera work and framework
of a movie. In cinema, the placement on the stage is important because that is
how it appears on the screen. The director is in charge of deciding on what
goes where, at what time, and how. Basically, if it is on the screen and if it
is a physical object that gets recorded by the camera, then it is part of the
mise-en-scene. Academically speaking, mise-en-scene is the collaboration of
many professionals in the production environment. Everyone in the production
such as the prop master, the set designer, the actors, or the make up artists
all have an influence in the mise-en-scene.
In the opera I watched, I
discovered that the singer had the crowd all to himself. The audience reacted
in a positive way. Technology is used in opera because of acoustics and sometimes
in the performance the performers are hoisted up using hydraulics or pulley
systems that levitate them.
