Why Did Opera Used to Last Five Hours?

There was a time when going to the opera was not an evening out in the modern sense. It could be an entire night, beginning in the afternoon and ending long after dinner. Performances of major operas could last four or even five hours, sometimes longer when intervals, encores and elaborate court ceremonies were taken into account.

To modern audiences, this can seem almost unimaginable. For much of opera's history, a five-hour performance was not necessarily considered excessive. The reasons have less to do with composers being incapable of writing concisely and more to do with the way opera functioned as a social, political and musical experience.

Opera was an evening, not simply a performance

One of the biggest differences between historical and modern opera was the amount of time audiences expected to spend at the theatre.

Opera developed in the courts of Renaissance and Baroque Italy, where performances were often part of elaborate celebrations. A production might be staged to mark a royal marriage, a political alliance, a birthday or another important occasion. The opera itself was only one element of a much larger spectacle.

Audiences were not necessarily expected to sit in silence and watch from beginning to end. They might arrive late, talk to one another, eat, drink, receive visitors or move around during the performance. The theatre was as much a social environment as it was a place for concentrated listening.

This helps explain why an opera lasting several hours did not necessarily feel like four hours of uninterrupted music.

Intervals could be very long

The running time printed on a modern opera programme can also be misleading when compared with historical practice.

A three-hour opera today might include two relatively short intervals. In earlier centuries, breaks could be considerably longer. There might be several acts, each separated by an interval, during which audiences could socialise, dine or attend to other business.

In Baroque opera, these intervals could also contain additional entertainment. Some operas were divided by comic intermezzi, dances or other performances. The total time spent at the theatre could therefore be much longer than the amount of music itself.

Singers were the stars

Another reason for the extraordinary length of some operas was the importance of star singers. In the eighteenth century, audiences often went to the opera primarily to hear particular performers. Famous castrati, sopranos and other virtuoso singers could command enormous fees and wield considerable influence over what was performed.

The music was consequently designed to give singers opportunities to display their abilities. A leading performer might have several elaborate arias, sometimes with substantial repetitions, ornamentation and opportunities for improvisation. An opera could therefore become a sequence of musical showcases built around its leading performers.

Audiences expected repetition

Modern listeners are accustomed to music moving continuously forwards. Historical opera often worked differently. An aria might follow a da capo form, in which the opening section returned after a contrasting middle section. Singers were expected to ornament the repeated passage, meaning that the second hearing could be substantially different from the first.

The repetition was not regarded as wasted time. It was an essential part of the musical experience, allowing performers to demonstrate their artistry. The audience, too, played a different role. Applause could interrupt an aria, particularly after an impressive vocal display. If a singer was especially successful, an aria might even be repeated.

In other words, the performance was not necessarily a fixed, uninterrupted sequence in the way we tend to experience opera today.

Opera was a spectacular form of entertainment

For much of its early history, opera was closely associated with spectacle. Sets could be enormous and mechanically sophisticated. Gods descended from the heavens, ships appeared on stage, buildings collapsed and armies marched across elaborate theatrical landscapes.

Costumes, choreography, stage machinery and lighting all contributed to the experience. This was particularly true of court opera, where there was often little reason to economise on either money or time. The production itself could demonstrate the wealth and power of its patron.

A long opera could therefore function almost like an extravagant festival rather than a conventional theatrical performance.

Some operas really were extraordinarily long

There are, however, plenty of examples where the music itself accounts for an enormous running time. Richard Wagner is perhaps the most famous example. His Der Ring des Nibelungen consists of four operas, performed over several days. The longest of them, Götterdämmerung, can take around five hours in performance.

But Wagner was not simply writing unusually long operas by accident. He had a radically different conception of what opera could be. He wanted music, drama, poetry, staging and mythology to form a unified theatrical experience.

Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal can all approach or exceed four hours depending on performance choices.

Baroque opera could be long for a different reason

The length of eighteenth-century opera often arose from a different set of conventions. Opera seria, the dominant serious operatic form of the period, was typically built around a succession of recitatives and arias. The plot moved forward in recitative, while arias allowed characters to stop and express a particular emotion or state of mind.

This could produce a structure that feels slow to modern audiences. A character might discover something, sing an aria about it, leave the stage, and then another character might enter and sing an aria responding to the same event. The dramatic action could therefore advance much more slowly than in a modern film or play.

Yet contemporary audiences understood and appreciated these conventions. They were not waiting impatiently for the plot to move on. The emotional and musical elaboration was itself the attraction.

The opera house was part of the social life of the city

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opera houses had become important social institutions. Going to the opera could be an opportunity to see and be seen. Wealthy patrons might have private boxes where they entertained guests. In some theatres, people could eat, drink and conduct conversations during performances.

The audience was therefore not always expected to give the stage its complete attention for several consecutive hours. This also explains why historical descriptions of opera audiences can seem surprisingly noisy to modern concertgoers. The convention that everyone should sit quietly in darkness, focused exclusively on the performers, developed gradually.

Modern opera became shorter

Opera did not suddenly become shorter at a particular moment. Instead, expectations changed gradually. The nineteenth century brought increasing emphasis on dramatic continuity. Composers such as Giuseppe Verdi increasingly integrated arias, ensembles and orchestral passages into a more continuous dramatic structure.

Later composers went further. Giacomo Puccini wrote operas that could still last several hours, but their pacing was generally much closer to modern theatrical expectations. At the same time, audiences became accustomed to shorter forms of entertainment. The rise of cinema, radio, recorded music and eventually television fundamentally changed expectations about how long a story should take to tell.

The opera house changed with them.

So, did people really sit through five hours of opera?

Sometimes, yes. But the idea that an eighteenth-century audience necessarily sat motionless for five hours listening to every note is misleading.

A long evening at the opera could involve several acts, lengthy intervals, socialising, food, conversation, spectacular stage effects and repeated arias. The performance was an event in which music was only one component.

And when the music itself was exceptionally long, audiences were often accustomed to a different pace of storytelling and listening. Today, a five-hour opera can feel like an endurance test. In earlier centuries, it could be closer to spending an entire evening at a major social occasion.

The strange thing, perhaps, is not that opera once lasted five hours. It is that we eventually decided an evening at the opera should fit neatly between dinner and bedtime.