The history of opera as it is presented today in America goes back to the late Renaissance in Italy, when a group of composers "invented" a new art form to resemble what they thought music-drama was like in classical Greece. Opera is often produced on a grand scale with great pageantry. Opera is more spectacular than most theater we are used to.

Today, when people think of great opera composers, they tend to think first of the famous Italians of the 19th century, such as Giuseppe Verdi, Gioacchino Rossini and Giacomo Puccini, whose works are known for their lyricism and romanticism. They also may think of the great German composers such as Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, who are known for their opulent orchestrations and mythological stories, or of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Austrian-born composer whose brilliant works remain popular today more than 200 years after his death.

However, during its 400-year history, European opera has been very diverse. There are great French, Russian and Czech operas by composers such as Debussy, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. Spanish opera, popular in Spanish speaking countries, is called zarzuela, and other countries, such as China, have their own styles of opera. There are also English and American operas by composers such as Benjamin Britten, Giancarlo Menotti, Philip Glass and John Adams.

Operas are usually sung in the language in which they were composed, which means that opera singers are trained to sing in Italian, German and French, and ideally other languages too, including English. Supertitles are used so that audiences will understand what is being sung. Supertitles are the words of the opera projected in English on a screen above the stage, just like subtitles used in foreign-language films.