10 Full-Length Operas on YouTube
Earlier this year we released Opera Roulette, a free, novel and randomised way to watch free opera scenes from your sofa. While researching that we discovered lots of full-length operas available on YouTube, some with hundreds of thousands of views, others with just a few hundred. Here are 10 from the sixteenth century up to the present day, by a range of composers including Francesca Caccini, Dame Ethel Smyth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Philip Glass. Some are under an hour (perfect for a lunch break) and others are three hours plus. See what takes your fancy and settle in!
Composed by Francesca Caccini
1 hour 30 minutes
The first opera written by a female composer, or at least the oldest that has survived the ages. It’s based on a passage from Ludovico Ariosto's fantasy verse novel titled Orlando Furioso. Caccini's opera changes the book's original story to expand the importance of women in the tale. In this rendition by Opera McGill, with the McGill Baroque Orchestra, the story from Alcina's enchanted island has been moved to a grand mansion full of magic and mysteries, complete with former lovers being trapped in picture frames hanging on the walls.
Composed by Claudio Monteverdi
2 hours
The Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra and the English Baroque Soloists perform L’Orfeo, an opera that received its premiere in 1607. This performance is from 2017 at the Teatro La Fenice, conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner on the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi’s birth. It’s had almost 90,000 views so far. The opera is based on the Greek legend of Orpheus, and tells the story of his descent to Hades and his fruitless attempt to bring his dead bride Eurydice back to the living world. It’s generally recognised as one of the first operas ever that is still regularly performed today.
Composed by Dame Ethel Smyth
2 hours 15 minutes
This opera was written by Dame Ethel Smyth, an English composer and leader in the women’s suffrage movement, and premiered in 1906 in Germany. It’s about piracy, love, and betrayal in a community of religious fanatics. It concerns an isolated community in Cornwall that possesses a religiously based, fanatical self-regard that leads it to justify theft and murder as God-given rights and virtues. Led by the community’s own pastor who invokes Christianity, violence becomes the instrument of realizing God’s will. The opera depicts the consequences of mass hysteria and populist justice, framed by a powerful display of orchestral writing, memorable motivic recurrence, and a brilliant use of chorus. This production is by Bard SummerScape Opera with the American Symphony Orchestra.
Composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
2 hours
This is a 2018 production by Livermore Valley Opera at the Bankhead Theater near San Francisco. It’s been watched around 25,000 times at the time of writing. “Mozart ushered in a new era in music history with this first of his operatic masterpieces. It tells of the rescue of the young Spaniard Konstanze and her friends by her fiancé Belmonte from the Ottoman Palace of Pascha Selim. Mozart transcends the popular “Turkish Music” fashion of the time with an opera of great emotional depth. Humanism triumphs at the end. Virtuoso singing and brilliant orchestration of a kind previously unheard in Vienna prompted the Emperor Joseph II to exclaim “Too many notes”!
Composed by Philip Glass
1 hour 15 minutes
This take on the famous Grimm fairy tale is “charming and chilling, a children's opera for thinking children (also known as ‘adults’)” (The New York Times). It tells of a Wicked Stepmother who murders her stepson and serves him up in a stew to his unsuspecting father. The boy’s sister buries her brother’s bones under a Juniper Tree, and the child’s spirit returns as a singing bird who wreaks vengeance on the evil Stepmother before being restored to life in the bosom of his family.
The performance is by Wolf Trap Opera, one of the most highly regarded residency programmes for emerging opera professionals in the US.
Composed by Leoš Janáček
1 hour 40 minutes
The Cunning Little Vixen is a Czech-language opera, composed in the 1920s. This production, with English subtitles, is from the Opéra national de Paris at the Opéra Bastille opera house. It’s been watched around 12,000 times on YouTube. This is Janáček’s lightest opera, despite the vixen’s death at the end of the work. The composer moved away from the more conversational style of previous and subsequent operas in favour of a more folk-like-style, and wove into its fabric some of his most experimental opera concepts (ballet, mime, and orchestral interludes). Writing his own libretto, he transformed the comedic cartoon into a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death by including the death of the vixen. This opera shows a deep understanding of life leading to the return of simplicity.”
Composed by Henry Purcell
55 minutes
This is a live, ultra high-definition video from the award-winning performance of Dido and Aeneas by Voices of Music and the San Francisco Girls Chorus at the Berkeley Early Music Festival in 2018. This concert won the San Francisco Classical Voice "Best of the Bay" award in three categories: Best Opera Performance, Best Choral Performance and Best Early Music Performance. It’s currently had around 77,000 views on YouTube. The story is based on Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid. It recounts the love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, for the Trojan hero Aeneas, and her despair when he abandons her.
Composed by Unsuk Chin
2 hours
Unsuk Chin was born in Seoul and is now resident in Berlin. Her opera Alice in Wonderland, first performed in 2007 and based on the Lewis Carroll books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, is very Tim Burton-esque: “It is a dream opera with a dark side” (Los Angeles Times). The production by the Bavarian State Opera is available on YouTube. Alice's dream starts with the arrival of the White Rabbit in a hurry, and then we rediscover during the two-hour show mythical characters, from the Cheshire Cat to the Mad Hatter, including all the animals of the tale. It contains many references to composers like Ravel, Handel, Elgar, Stravinsky and Puccini and features many unusual instruments such as musical saws, slide whistles, an accordion, a harmonica, and a bass clarinet, a homage to George Gershwin.
Composed by George Frideric Handel
3 hours 22 minutes across 2 videos
This production is hosted on the EuroArtsChannel and has had nearly 200,000 views already. It dates from 2010 and is live from the Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera) with Wiener Staatsballett (Vienna State Ballet). Alcina was composed for Handel's first season at the Covent Garden Theatre in London, premiering in 1735. “The internationally famous British Director Adrian Noble places his Alcina into a framework which begins in the magnificent ballroom of the Devonshire-House in London Piccadilly.”
Composed by Lewis Murphy
53 minutes
A youth opera exploring the experiences of young people forced by war to flee their homes, composed in 2017 by Lewis Murphy, who was Glyndebourne’s Young Composer-in-Residence. Belongings tracks the journeys of two groups of young people, divided by decades but united by the geographical displacement they experience. Accompanied by their teacher, a group of evacuees board the train from London to Lewes to escape the Blitz, singing of the exciting adventure they anticipate in the countryside. Their optimism fades as they begin to pine for home, and one group decides to run away. Meanwhile, in the present day, a group of refugee children are rebuilding their recently demolished shelters. They try to remain positive while contemplating the dangerous final stage of their journeys.
📸 © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Robert Workman
Hannah Fiddy is a creative entrepreneur, developing new audiences for classical music. She has created and promoted numerous concerts outside of traditional spaces, including warehouses, pubs, clubs, museums, hospitals, prisons and even in Primark. Hannah is also an interviewer, writer and guest lecturer, and runs the Avon Chamber Choir in Bristol. In a past life she founded London Flashmob, producing quirky events from wedding proposals to cultural pranks for up to 1,000 people.
Follow Hannah on Twitter @Hannah_Fiddy.