Opera and singing

The fifth entry is il coro lirico, and the adjective in it is the one word on this list that an English reader mistranslates without noticing. Lirico is the ordinary Italian adjective for opera as an institution. Il teatro lirico is the opera house, la stagione lirica is the opera season, un cantante lirico is an opera singer of any voice at all, and la lirica on its own is the art form, the thing a city either has or has not. « Lyric » in English does none of that work: it survives in the names of buildings and almost nowhere else, and the everyday word is simply « opera ». One corner does line up, and it is worth marking because it hides the rest: attached to a voice type, un tenore lirico is a lyric tenor, a weight of voice between the light and the dramatic, in both languages. The trap running the other way is sharper. The words of a song are il testo, never le liriche, which are poems — so asking a singer for le liriche of a song asks for something that does not exist.