Opera continued to flourish after Wagner and Verdi. The orchestra retained the important role it had achieved, if in different ways, with both of these composers. The Romantic emphasis on strong emotions, alongside powerful music to convey and probe them, continued.

These emotional passages now tended to break down into ever freer and more fragmentary melodic forms, and the distinction between recitative and aria, blurred in Verdi, became even harder to maintain. Wagner’s leitmotiv technique was employed in most operas, in one form or another; its dramatic and psychological powers were acknowledged by composers and audiences alike.

What composers and audiences turned away from, however, was Wagner’s mythical, quasi-philosophical ideal for opera. “Music drama” in Wagner’s sense gave way to new realistic tendencies. Modern-day subjects were chosen for operas, showing up-to-date middle-or lower-class characters, rather than kings and queens, gods and heroes. A few of Verdi’s operas had already pointed in this direction, most notably La traviata (see page 261).

Late Romantic realistic operas typically emphasized the sordid and violent aspects of life, as far as the censorship of the day would allow — in this they carried further a tendency we can already glimpse in Rigoletto. A famous and masterful example is Carmen (1875), by the French composer Georges Bizet. Set in contemporary Spain, it tells the tale of a fiery, sexually irresistible Gypsy woman who works in a cigarette factory and a soldier who falls under her spell. Having abandoned his fiancée and deserted his regiment for her, he loses her to a devil-may-care matador; at the final climax, mad with jealousy, he stabs her to death. All this is very distant from the mythical setting, the minimal action, the lingering gazes, and the psychological probing of The Valkyrie.