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What's Opera, Doc? Part 2. Les Mis.

Writing a ‘musical’ in 1980 means aiming for Broadway and the West End and large audiences of the general public, whereas writing an ‘opera’ means you are aiming for the Met and Covent Garden and a small, select audience of classical music fans, as part of a divergence in cultures that originated in the 1920s. It’s worth considering how of the two existing traditions at the time – operas and operettas – the former essentially became seen as the domain of the privileged elite, and the latter evolved into a style so keen to divorce itself from any link to the former that it could absorb works that, stylistically speaking, lie entirely in the operatic tradition.
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About that: one aspect of Maoist China that foreigners failed to make sense of was its reliance on operas as a propaganda tool. To Westerners the idea seemed laughable, but that's because, by then, opera was seen in the West as an elitist art form, whereas in China, it was something enjoyed by every social class.
 
Hendryk said:
About that: one aspect of Maoist China that foreigners failed to make sense of was its reliance on operas as a propaganda tool. To Westerners the idea seemed laughable, but that's because, by then, opera was seen in the West as an elitist art form, whereas in China, it was something enjoyed by every social class.
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I mean this is very much about Western opera because Chinese Opera is a very different beast despite some similarities.
 
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