Rosalía’s Berghain is a gothic pop hit, but is it an opera? | music

TToday’s Spotify Global Top 50 seems to be business as usual: two Taylor Swift songs; Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars are dying with a smile to hang out for the eighth month. Ordinary male pop stars Sombr and Alex Warren are doing brisk business.

But nestled in the crowd is something strange: a gothic, baroque attack backed by Vivaldi-style strings and operatic singing in German and Spanish.

Berghain is the lead single from Catalan pop star Rosalía’s fourth album, Lux, a massive orchestral work that has confounded critics and fans alike.

It features the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), a Catalan choir, Björk performing “Divine Intervention” and alternative rock star Yves Thomour paraphrasing Mike Tyson’s 2002 tirade to his rival Lennox Lewis: “I’ll fuck you until you love me.”

Since her groundbreaking album El Mal Querer in 2018, 33-year-old musician and producer Rosalia Villa Tobella has made her name through pioneering breakthroughs in flamenco, which she studied at a prestigious music school. She has also attracted praise and controversy for exploring Caribbean and Latin sounds on her 2022 album Motomami.

Her new record focuses on her classical training: the LSO is featured throughout – directed by Daniel Bjarnason – alongside fado and flamenco singers. “It’s exciting to watch this woman grow,” Bjork wrote in a supportive tweet. “Congratulations to her on this amazing album, which changed the style of Kung Fu. This concept is fierce!”

With its thundering strings and Wagnerian vocals, the title track is more in the parts of a Radio 3 hit than a Spotify hit, but pop fans seem happy to have the star back. As one person posted on TikTok about Berghain’s apparent heartbreak: “I love everything that’s wrong with Rosalía, this song is actually crazy.”

Perhaps, predictably, classical music fans seem to be the most divided. It caught the attention of Classic FM, which asked on its website: “Why does Rosalia Berghain’s song include a German symphony orchestra and opera?”

On TikTok, classical music influencer Daria Schlah called it “possibly the most important thing to happen to classical music this year… finally an artist has put out something that will really change the way people see this tradition of music.”

Classical critic Hugh Morris disagreed, calling it “new kitsch”. He accused Rosalía of perpetuating the “objectification” of classical music and using “pre-digested musical gestures as shorthand for emotional depth or power.” Others pointed out that despite her technical prowess as a singer, the amplification and effects meant that the song could not be considered an opera.

New York City-based opera singer Sarah Khan, who went viral for her traditional operatic rendition of Berghain on TikTok, praised Rosalía’s intersection of genres.

“She heard opera immediately, but she was also trained in vocal art It was flamenco“And you can tell she did a lot of studying to perfect this song,” she said. She also praised Rosalía for singing in another language.

“It’s difficult to sing in German if it’s not your first language,” she said. “Part of classical opera training is learning how to maneuver your resonance and tone through languages ​​you don’t know. She did that really beautifully.”

Khan, 26, said she related to the song’s rare female perspective — about overcoming the fear and anger of a male partner, melting like a “sugar cube” — compared to the male perspective in most operas.

In most scripts written for men, she said, “There’s a hero, a direct climax and a climax. But in this story, you can see her wrestling with her broken heart as the music gets louder and softer. It’s not like she pierces the heart and then doesn’t have a broken heart anymore, she goes in and out of it. That pulls the story into a very feminine and human place.”

For Khan, whether Berghain technically constitutes an opera is immaterial. “The way opera connects with a person is very subjective, and I think it’s beautiful,” she said. “The arrival of opera into the mainstream inspires more people to sing it, and perhaps to learn it and appreciate it and want to go and see opera.

“As Rosalía said this week, this may not be what people technically like or want, but it is what they need,” she added. “It may not be a person’s first interest, but in the end they may say, ‘I need opera and classical music in my life,’ and I see that as only a positive thing.”