Adelaida A. brings real authority to this as a trained singer, and her feel for opera's power is worth keeping. Let me give a more argumentative answer, since "why does opera matter" deserves a claim you can defend rather than a list of fine qualities. I come at this partly as a practitioner, since I spent years realizing Duke Ellington's unfinished opera Queenie Pie for the stage, so the question of what opera can do and whom it can hold is one I have worked on directly.
My argument is this. Opera matters because it was the first sustained Western attempt to make sung drama carry the full weight of human emotion and narrative at once, and because that capacity is large enough to hold traditions far beyond the European court where it began, which is exactly why it still has work to do.
The origin sets up the first half of the claim. Opera did not come from the traveling commedia dell'arte, as the earlier answer suggests, but from a deliberate intellectual project. Around 1597 to 1600 in Florence, a circle of humanists and musicians known as the Florentine Camerata set out to revive what they believed was the practice of ancient Greek tragedy, in which the drama was sung rather than spoken. They were dissatisfied with the dense polyphony of Renaissance music, where overlapping voices buried the meaning of the words, and they argued for a single vocal line over sparse accompaniment so the text and its feeling could come through. Jacopo Peri's Dafne and Euridice were the first works, and Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607) raised the form into mature art. Opera began, in other words, as a solution to a problem, which was how to make music serve drama rather than obscure it.
That founding insight, that music can express mood, define character, and heighten a dramatic moment more directly than words alone, is why opera still matters. It is the engine behind every later form that fuses music and story, from the Broadway musical to the film score. When a film score tells you how to feel about a scene, it is working the vein opera opened. Opera was the laboratory where Western culture worked out how sung sound carries narrative and feeling, and those techniques spread far past the opera house.
The second half of my claim is where the form earns its continued life, and where my own work sits. Opera is often treated as a fixed European inheritance, but its capacity to hold drama in music is not the property of any one tradition. Ellington understood this. He spent decades on Queenie Pie, calling it at various points an opéra comique, a street opera, and a folk opera, precisely because he was using the form's full dramatic power to carry African American music, Harlem life, and pointed social commentary on colorism and gender that the European concert world had kept at its margins. Realizing that work taught me that opera is most alive when it stretches to hold what it was not originally built for, since the same machinery that served Greek myth in 1607 can serve a Harlem beauty queen and the sound of a jazz orchestra.
A fair answer should grant the counterargument, since opera's significance is genuinely contested. Critics note that it has often been an elite and expensive art tied to wealthy patronage, that its conventions can strain believability, and that other forms now carry musical storytelling to far wider audiences. These objections have force. The response is not that opera stands above criticism but that its influence runs underneath the very forms that have displaced it, and that the tradition keeps proving able to absorb new voices, which is the opposite of a museum piece.
So opera matters less because it is old or refined and more because of what it discovered and what it can still do. It established that music could carry drama as a primary language, it built the techniques for doing so, and that capacity remains open, wide enough to hold a Florentine myth and a Harlem opera in the same long tradition.
Sources:
Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker. A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.
Gaspard Bolin, Marc T. "Update: Reflecting on Lexington Philharmonic's Performance of the Queenie Pie Suite." Marc T. Gaspard Bolin (blog), June 14, 2022. https://www.brassopera.com/blog/update-reflecting-on-lexington-philharmonics-performance-of-the-queenie-pie-suite.
Gaspard Bolin, Marc T. "Realization of the Opera, Queenie Pie." Marc T. Gaspard Bolin (blog), January 15, 2022. https://www.brassopera.com/blog/realization-of-the-opera-queenie-pie.
Gaspard Bolin, Marc T. "Duke Ellington's Queenie Pie." Marc T. Gaspard Bolin (blog), May 29, 2019. https://www.brassopera.com/blog/queeniepie.
