不知道同学们托福考试准备的怎么样了？在此托福考试网为大家整理了关于托福考试（听力）材料供大家阅读，希望对大家有所帮助。祝大家取的好成绩！

The word opera means work, actually it means works. It’s the plural of the word

opus from the Latin. And in Italian it refers in general to works of art. Opera

Lyric or lyric of opera refers to what we think of as opera, the musical drama.

Opera was commonplace in Italy for almost thousands of years before it

became commercial as a venture. And during those years, several things

happened primarily linguistic or thematic and both involving secularization.

Musical drama started in the churches. It was an educational tool. It was used

primarily as a vehicle for teaching religion and was generally presented in the

Latin, the language of the Christian Church which had considerable influence

in Italy at that time. But the language of everyday life was evolving in Europe

and at a certain point in the middle ages it was really only merchants, Socratics

and clergy who can deal with Latin. The vast majority of the population used

their own regional vernacular in all aspects to their lives. And so in what is now

Italy, operas quit being presented in Latin and started being presented in

Italian. And once that happened, the themes of the opera presentations also

started to change. And musical drama moved from the church to the plaza right

outside the church. And the themes again, the themes changed. And opera

was no longer about teaching religion as it was about satire and about

expressing the ideas of society your government without committing yourself

to writing and risking imprisonment or persecution, or what have you.

Opera, as we think of it, is of course a rather restive form. It is the melodious

drama of ancient Greek theater, the term ‘melodious drama’ being shortened

eventually to ‘melodrama’ because operas frequently are melodramatic, not to

say unrealistic. And the group that put the first operas together that we have

today even, were, they were…well…it was a group of men that included Gallo

Leo’s father Venchesil, and they met in Florence he and a group of friends of

the counts of the party and they formed what is called the Camarola Dayir

Bardy. And they took classical theater and reproduced it in the Renaissance’s

time. This…uh…this produced some of the operas that we have today.

Now what happened in the following centuries is very simple. Opera originated

in Italy but was not confined to Italy any more than the Italians were. And so as

the Italians migrated across Europe, they carried theater with them and opera

specifically because it was an Italian form. What happened is that the major

divide in opera that endures today took place. The French said opera

auto-reflect the rhythm and Kevin of dramatic literature, bearing in mind that

we are talking about the golden age in French literature. And so the music was

secondary, if you will, to the dramatic Kevin of language, to the way the rhythm

of language was used to express feeling and used to add drama and of course

as a result instead of arias or solos, which would come to dominated Italian

opera. The French relied on that what is the Italian called French Word 1 or

French Word 2 in English. The lyrics were spoken, frequently to the

accomp**nt of a harpsichord.

The French said you really cannot talk about real people who lived in opera

and they relied on mythology to give them their characters and their plots,

mythology, the past old traditions, the novels of chivalry or the epics of chivalry

out of the middle Ages. The Italian said, no this is a great historical tool and

what a better way to educate the public about Neo or Attalla or any number of

people than to put them into a play they can see and listen to. The English

appropriated opera after the French. Opera came late to England because all

theaters, public theaters were closed, of course, during their civil war. And it

wasn’t until the restoration in 1660 that public theaters again opened and

opera took off. The English made a major adjustment to opera and exported

what they had done to opera back to Italy. So that you have this circle of

musical influences, the Italians invented opera, the French adapted it, the

English adopted it, and the Italians took it back.

It came to America late and was considered to elites for the general public. But

Broadway musicals fulfilled a similar function for a great long while. George

Champon wrote about opera, “If an extraterrestrial being or two appear before

us and say, what is your society like, what is this Earth thing all about, you

could do worse than take that creature to an opera.” Because opera does, after

all, begin with a man and a woman and any motion

编辑推荐：

托福考试（听力）材料汇总