Rap/hip-hop vs. opera lecture: senseless
Screenwriter Ronald Harwood reveals the unfortunate limitations of his musical culture in the scene where the character Reginald Paget teaches a rather ridiculous and unenlightening class to teenagers about rap/hip-hop music, opera music, and the supposed similarities and differences between the two. The main problem with this scene is that it involves a largely pointless apples-to-oranges comparison: rap and opera are quite different things functionally, not just stylistically. And the scene is particularly regrettable because there are good apples-to-apples comparisons between rap and classical music that almost any real opera singer, especially a British one, would know about, and that really could have shed some light on how different musicians through the ages have dealt with similar concepts.
The one classical piece above all others that Reginald should have talked about, and played examples from, is poet Edith Sitwell and composer William Walton's "entertainment" for speaker and chamber group Façade. Façade is rap music, even though parts of it were written as early as 1921, and some parts were publicly premiered as early as 1923. Other pieces of classical and semiclassical music Reginald could have mentioned are: Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (1912); Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat (1918) (those sections where the narrator speaks over music); the songs "Rock Island" and "Ya Got Trouble", and the introduction to "Seventy-Six Trombones", in Meredith Willson's 1957 musical The Music Man; those songs of Professor Higgins in Lerner and Loewe's 1956 musical My Fair Lady that are customarily partly spoken rather than sung; the speaking chorus of animals near the end of Ravel's 1925 opera L'enfant et les sortilèges; and perhaps even some examples of melodrama in the word's original sense, namely the combining of dramatic speech with background music, such as in Richard Strauss's Enoch Arden (1897).
There are probably some other significant rap-like classical pieces that I'm not aware of; I'd certainly enjoy hearing about them from other posters.