Opera & Musical Theatre Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

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 2

Which sung-through musical by Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil, first staged in French in 1980 and in a revised English version by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1985, follows an ex-convict pursued for decades by a relentless policeman against the backdrop of a failed Paris uprising?

Question 3

Which British composer, working often with the lyricist Tim Rice and later others, built the sung-through, spectacle-driven megamusical with Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express and The Phantom of the Opera?

Question 4

Which achievement was completed in April 2023, when a long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber musical gave its 13,981st and final Broadway performance after almost 35 years, having long since become the longest-running show in that theatre district's history?

Question 5

Which 1791 German-language stage work, with spoken dialogue between the musical numbers, sends the prince Tamino and the bird-catcher Papageno on a trial-laden quest, features the Queen of the Night's furious high-flying aria, and is laced with the symbolism of freemasonry?

Question 6

Which 1786 Mozart comedy, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, unfolds over one madcap day as a resourceful valet and his bride outwit their scheming employer the Count, who is trying to exercise an old feudal right over the bride?

Question 7

Which annual summer opera festival, held since 1876 in a Bavarian town in a theatre its founder designed with a hidden, sunken orchestra pit, performs only the ten mature stage works of that one founder?

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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.