October 7, 2025 | Author: Dominic Nicholas | Category:Repertoire Guides
Elina Garanca as Carmen
If you want human emotion laid bare, opera is your art form - despair, longing, joy, love, it’s all there. And within an opera the purest expression of this is the aria, where a singer will reflect upon or drive forward the drama in a solo song.
In the hands of a great composer an aria is a perfect marriage of text and music, often producing music of the profoundest beauty. Great arias tend to be the most celebrated part of any opera, so much so that musicians often choose to perform them as stand-alone concert pieces.
Here is our choice of the most beautiful of these magnificent works. Follow the links to find sheet music for your instrument and to practise with our exclusive backing tracks.
Puccini wrote so many great arias that it is hard to choose amongst them, but Nessun Dorma is special. With one of the most magical refrains it builds to a soaring climax. And, of course, who could resist the late, great Pavarotti’s iconic performances of the work?
A piece that seems to suspend time itself, Casta Diva is one of the most revered bel canto arias. A prayer for peace it seems quite simple to perform, but it is subtly decorated and the singer must maintain a sense of absolute stillness whilst negotiating these nuances.
Lascia ch’io pianga is an achingly lovely plea for freedom and divine mercy. A baroque era masterpiece, it is one of Handel’s most powerful and direct musical creations.
Any number of Mozart arias might be included in this list, but Dove Sono, in which the Countess laments the loss of her husband’s love, is a miraculous mixture of melancholy and grace, loss and forgiveness.
Carmen’s aria of self-introduction before the townspeople of Seville is an iconic moment in Bizet’s beloved opera. Playfully and seductively, in it Carmen shares her philosophy of love.
Set over a chromatic ground bass, Dido contemplates her own death after having been abandoned by Aeneas. Often just known as Dido’s Lament, When I am Laid in Earth is one of opera’s most perfect expressions of grief.
Another Handel pearl, Ombra Mai Fu is so achingly lovely that one might think it deals with matters of great import. In fact it is a moment of quiet reflection where the character Xerxes admires a tree and its shade.
A profound moment from the comic opera Gianni Schicchi (part of Puccini’s Il Trittico) in which a daughter pleads with her father to let her marry her love. It’s both playful and touching, an earnest entreaty to her ‘dear daddy.’
A magical aria in which a water spirit, who has fallen in love with a human prince, longs to become mortal so she can be with him. It contains a luminosity that seems perfectly to intersect the human and supernatural.
An aria of both seduction and betrayal, in which the temptress Dalila tries to win the love of the Hebrew hero Samson, but only because the has been ordered to betray him. Saint-Saëns intoxicating music makes us feel her apparent sincerity, even as we know of her deception.
