A grand history of small operas

OPERA is often assumed to be just about bigness. Powerful voices, huge choruses and imposing orchestral forces dominate our sense of the art form.

Yet overwhelming scale isn't everything.

And, at the moment, scale is a particular problem for opera companies trying to manage a return amid the coronavirus pandemic. While grand opera - that enemy of social distancing - might be impossible for a time, that doesn't mean opera can't work. For centuries, composers have been writing more compact pieces.

The last century, in particular, has seen a variety of approaches to concise classical music drama. What follows below is a tour through the history of the radically short opera - something similar in length to an hourlong television drama (or even shorter). You could hear all 10 of the works below in about the same amount of time it takes to watch Wagner's Götterdämmerung at the Metropolitan Opera.

Director Pierre Audi included a staging of this scene in his cycle of Monteverdi's better-known operas - and, in an interview in the DVD release, also calls it the composer's greatest work.

She blended two different texts to craft the libretto: a Homeric siren song and a portion of James Joyce's Ulysses. The best fun to be had here, though, doesn't involve spotting the references to older texts; rather, listen for the swooping interplay between the composer's motifs for soprano and a kinetic, quick-changing orchestra.

The varied instrumental writing, for string quartet, has a prismatic quality. Stray bluesy figures and tart chromaticism bring to mind an observation about Hailstork once made by conductor Thomas Wilkins: "You hear his upbringing in his music; you hear his culture in his music. But it's not on the sleeve."