POP OPERA SINGERS – Success and Controversy

October 20, 2024

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POP OPERA SINGERS – Success and Controversy

Many opera singers crossed over into the popular genre in order to attract a different and greater audience.
Just think of Monstserrat Caballé and Freddy Mercury in Barcelona, Luciano Paverotti with Zucchero and Eric Clapton, Placido Domingo with John Denver, José Carreras with Sissel – and many more.

On the other hand, many popular music artists ventured into opera, some with spectacular (commercial) success.
But for the opera fan community these are somewhat suspect and are often discussed with great controversy.

The positive argument is often, that a popular artist singing opera will get his traditional followers interested in opera and thus gain additional audience for opera.
The negative argument is that these pop artist do not know how to sing opera and rather destroy the pure art of opera singing. The uninitiated listeners will get a wrong impression of what real opera singing is.
And it is also argued that in fact very few opera fans are recruited by it.

But there are very many pop opera singers around.
Here are video examples of the most famous of them:

ANDREA BOCELLI