[2] At first it was applied to works which parodied Italian opera buffa, in the sense that the words were changed but not the music.
One of the earliest examples is the librettist Charles-Simon Favart's Le caprice amoureux, ou Ninette à la cour (1755), which was a parody of Carlo Goldoni's Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno (1748), a pasticcio with music by Vincenzo Ciampi and others (first performed in Paris in 1753 as Bertoldo in corte).
[4]) The first French opéra comique with original music, although not labeled as such, was Egidio Duni's Le peintre amoureux de son modèle (1757).
The director of the Opéra-Comique company, Jean Monnet, feared that a work by an unknown foreign composer would not be successful, so he advertised it as a parody of an Italian intermezzo, Il pittore innamorato.
[6] The Oxford Dictionary of Music lists other examples of the form: Christoph Willibald Gluck's La rencontre imprévue (1764), François-André Danican Philidor's Tom Jones (1765), Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny's Le déserteur (1769), and André Ernest Modeste Grétry's Zémire et Azor (1771).