What is Chamber Opera?

The Very Beginning of Opera

Chamber opera is to grand opera as a Mozart symphony is to a Mahler symphony.

If we consider Aida and Turandot as grand operas, then we see Amahl and the Night Visitors and Turn of the Screw as chamber operas. It is possible – and right – to love both genres. Each has great power and beauty.

Above all, chamber opera offers intimate communication. Imagine a close-up in a film and you have a sense of how chamber opera succeeds.

In fact, chamber opera is how opera began, around the year 1600. Exquisitely personal truth-telling, in music and narrative, is how it endures.