Opera & Musical Theatre Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which long-running argument concerns a 1935 Gershwin work, asking whether a through-sung piece with recitative, written for classically trained voices but premiered in a Broadway theatre and full of song hits, should be programmed by opera houses or by commercial producers?

Question 2

Which Victorian English partnership, a dramatist and a composer, wrote a string of comic operas including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, staged by the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte at the Savoy Theatre?

Question 3

Which musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, released first as a concept album in 1976 and staged in 1978, follows the rise of a poor Argentine actress to become the powerful and adored wife of a president, with a sceptical narrator called Che looking on?

Question 4

Which New York company, founded in 1883 and since 1966 housed in a building at Lincoln Center with a five-thousand-seat auditorium, is the largest repertory opera organisation in the world, and has broadcast a live performance on the radio almost every Saturday in the season since 1931?

Question 5

Which composer-lyricist, who first made his name writing only the words for West Side Story and Gypsy, went on to write both music and lyrics for Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods, prizing wit, ambivalence and intricate craft over easy tunes?

Question 6

Which American soprano became the first Black singer to achieve full international stardom in opera, made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1961 to a 42-minute ovation, and opened the company's new Lincoln Center house in 1966 in a role written for her?

Question 7

What is the German-derived name for the rehearsal, usually the first with the full orchestra, at which the singers sit and simply sing through the score with the players, with no acting, movement or costume, to fix the musical side before adding the staging back in?

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About Opera & Musical Theatre

Opera and musical theatre are two branches of the same tree, sung drama on a stage, and this quiz covers both in eighty questions. Each describes a work, a voice type, a role, a piece of jargon, a theatre, a performer or an event, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains it with the story or the record attached.

The first pack is the essentials of each side. For opera: the aria and the recitative, the libretto, the soprano and the tenor, bel canto and verismo, the operas Carmen, La boheme and The Magic Flute, the houses La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera, and the stars Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti. For musical theatre: the book musical, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Hamilton and the Tony Awards.

The second pack goes wider. The mezzo, baritone and bass voices, coloratura and the trouser role; the operas Aida, Tosca, The Barber of Seville, Madama Butterfly and Don Giovanni; the Bayreuth Festival, Porgy and Bess, the singers Domingo, Caruso and Leontyne Price, and the workings of surtitles, the claque and Gilbert and Sullivan. Then the musicals: operetta, Show Boat, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, Rent, The Lion King, Wicked, Cabaret; the jukebox and concept and mega musicals; Bob Fosse, Hal Prince and the eleven o'clock number.

The third pack is history and lore: the Florentine Camerata that invented opera; The Threepenny Opera and Nixon in China; the sunken orchestra pit; Marian Anderson's 1955 Metropolitan debut and the disastrous first Bayreuth Festival of 1876; the record-breaking run of The Phantom of the Opera; the controversy around The Mikado; the opera-or-musical argument over Porgy and Bess; the curtain call and the Gypsy Robe; Sweeney Todd, the out-of-town tryout, Evita, The Book of Mormon; the Callas and Tebaldi rivalry; the horseshoe auditorium and the Paris chandelier that inspired the Phantom; the record 12 Tonys of The Producers; and the swing and the sitzprobe.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, a work beside works, a voice beside voices, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Images are used only where they cannot give the answer away: a plain photo of an empty auditorium, an orchestra pit or a bare stage appears on a question about a term or a person, chosen to fit every one of the four options equally. Facts and dates have been checked, and a few myths, such as the tale that Aida opened the Suez Canal, are corrected.